Here's something mind-blowing I just reported for Discovery News. It's from way, way, way beyond Earth. But it's so totally strange that I had to share it so you can comment on it. The original story with videos, etc., is posted
here.
Sept. 25, 2008 -- Astronomers
have stumbled upon an unexplained two-million-mile-per-hour sideways
shift in the universe toward a colossal, unseen, unknown gravity source
beyond the horizon of the observable universe.
What's being called a dark flow appears to be pulling vast clusters
of galaxies toward a 20-degree-wide patch of sky between the
constellations of Centaurus and Vela.
"It does fly in the face of everything we know," said astronomer
Dale Kocevski of the University of California at Davis. He's one of the
authors of a paper in the Sept. 24 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters which introduced the discovery. "I'm sure it's going to be controversial."
The dark flow was detected by studying 700 very distant clusters of galaxies which are lit up by hot, X-ray-emitting gases.
First the team of researchers led by NASA's Alexander Kashlinsky
carefully located the X-ray clusters -- each containing thousands of
galaxies.
Next, they looked at the same spots on a map of what's called the
cosmic microwave background -- the attenuated glow from the first light
that was free to travel through space just 380,000 years after the universe was born. This glow was mapped in detail by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).
According to theory, when the ancient microwaves pass through galaxy
clusters they should change temperature in predictable ways, depending
on whether the galaxy is moving relative to the background glow. So
this work started as an experiment to test that effect -- what's called
the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SV) effect -- and to see if any
movement could be detected.
"We were hoping to measure something there, but probably not much,"
said Kashlinsky. "To our great surprise what we found instead is that
the velocity was quite higher than expected."
Not only were the galaxy clusters moving, but over a span of five
billion light-years -- more than a third of the age of the universe --
they were all heading for the same place. It was a truly bizarre and
unexpected result.
The measurements suggest far more than the distant clusters are
moving, said Kashlinsky. Rather, the entire universe -- including our
own galaxy -- is feeling the tug of the unseen mega-mass beyond the
edge of the universe.
As for what could be exerting such a powerful, pervasive tug, it
can't be anything within our universe, since there just isn't anything
with remotely enough mass, said Kocevski. No way. That means it's
something we can't see -- beyond the observable universe.
The sole possible explanation Kashlinsky offers is that there might
be a large, very bulky neighboring part of the universe which is so far
away we cannot see it. It could be, if inflationary theories are
correct, a twin universe that inflated less evenly than our own did
soon after the Big Bang.
The inflationary theory suggests that our universe went through a
brief period of hyper expansion soon after the Big Bang. It explains
how matter managed to spread out so evenly in space, rather than get
stuck clumped in just one corner of space, as would happen in a more
gradually expanding universe. Inflation moves everything apart faster
than gravity could clump it.
It could be, then, that there was another, less effective inflation
next door to our observable universe and that other blob from the Big
Bang remained clumpier. If so it could be out there, loaded with
matter, and it is exerting a powerful gravitational pull on every
observable thing in our universe.
Maybe.
"We are kind of still puzzled by the result," said Kashlinsky. "We
kept checking and checking (the observations and calculations) and
nothing else can explain this."
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