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Should the search for alien life in our universe come up empty-handed, it might be worth checking in on a neighboring universe instead.

According to a new pair of studies in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, there’s a decent chance that life-fostering planets could exist in a parallel universe — even if that universe were being torn apart by dark energy.

The idea that our universe is just one of many, perhaps infinite, other universes is known as the multiverse theory. Scientists have previously thought that such parallel universes, if they exist, would have to meet an extremely strict set of criteria to allow for the formation of stars, galaxies and life-fostering planets like those seen in our own universe. [5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse]

In the new study, researchers ran a massive computer simulation to build new universes under various starting conditions. They found that the conditions for life might be a little broader than previously thought — especially when it comes to the mysterious pull of dark energy.

Dark energy

Dark energy is a mysterious, invisible force thought to exist in the empty spaces of our universe. You could think about it as the archnemesis of gravity; while gravity pulls matter closer together, dark energy flings it apart — and dark energy is winning this cosmic tug-of-war handily.

Not only is our universe expanding, thanks to the constant, invisible push of dark energy, but the rate of that expansion is also getting faster and faster every day. It's thought that, as more empty space appears in the universe, even more dark energy appears to fill it. (Dark energy is not the same as dark matter, which is an abundant, invisible form of matter thought to be responsible for some very weird gravitational phenomena around space.)

Scientists don't know exactly what dark energy is or how it works; some think it's an intrinsic property of space — what Einstein called the cosmological constant — while others attribute it to a fundamental force called quintessence, with dynamic rules all its own. Others don't even agree that it exists. But whatever it is, everyone can agree that there's a whole lot of it: According to the best current estimates, nearly 70 percent of the mass-energy of our universe may be made of dark energy.

https://www.livescience.com/62558-parallel-universe-aliens-survive-dark-energy.html