Dark flow discovered
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"Dark Flow" Discovered at Edge of the Universe: Hundreds of Millions of Stars Racing Towards a Cosmic Hotspot
"Dark Flow" sounds like a new SciFi Channel series. It's not! Back in the Middle Ages, maps showed terrifying images of sea dragons at the boundaries of the known world. Today, scientists have observed strange new motion at the very limits of the known universe - kind of where you'd expect to find new things, but they still didn't expect this. A huge swath of galactic clusters seem to be heading to a cosmic hotspot and nobody knows why.
The unexplained motion has hundreds of millions of stars dashing towards a certain part of the sky at over eight hundred kilometers per second. Not much speed in cosmic terms, but the preferred direction certainly is: most cosmological models have things moving in all directions equally at the extreme edges of the universe. Something that could make things aim for a specific spot on such a massive scale hasn't been imagined before. The scientists are keeping to the proven astrophysical strategy of calling anything they don't understand "dark", terming the odd motion a "dark flow".
A black hole can't explain the observations - objects would accelerate into the hole, while the NASA scientists see constant motion over a vast expanse of a billion light-years. You have no idea how big that is. This is giant on a scale where it's not just that we can't see what's doing it; it's that the entire makeup of the universe as we understand it can't be right if this is happening.
Which is fantastic! Such discoveries force a whole new set of ideas onto the table which, even if they turn out to be wrong, are the greatest ways to advance science and our understanding of everything. One explanation that's already been offered is that our universe underwent a period of hyper-inflation early in its existence, and everything we think of as the vast and infinite universe is actually a small corner under the sofa of the real expanse of reality. Which would be an amazing, if humbling, discovery.
Posted by Luke McKinney.
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Signature ? How ?
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/pdf/276175main_ApJ_inpress.pdf
Can you say "Gee, cool. Cool but not the amazing thing that your link makes it look like"?
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Gee, cool. Cool but not the amazing thing that my link makes it look like
lol.
I thought I'd posted on this subject, but even if I did this topic has received more of a response anyway. The universe never ceases to amaze.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
Well Allison, you crack me up. Let me try this again.
Astronomers have found evidence of a third group of galaxies that are moving in a direction slightly different than would be expected in a homogeneous universe that is uniformly expanding. Of course, the fact that the universe is not homogeneous on the intergalactic scale really ought to lead to the conclusion that uniform motion is just not to be expected.
In fact, they were specifically trying to refine an observational technique that they expected would show at least that much. Note however that I observed that this is the third such general non-uniform stream which has been detected. The gravitational sources for the other two have been observed and cataloged.
Mind you, a headline that says “Astronomers find more or less what they expected in pretty much the place that they thought it would be” does not exactly sell magazines. So of course the headline has to be sensational enough to grab attention. Throw in the word “dark” and the gee whiz crowd will see to it that copies of the magazine fly off of the news stand.
Honestly though, what bugs me most about your article is that it was written for the “gee whiz Martha, look what those highbrow science types have gone and done now” segment of the general population. Just one example:
OK, in the greater scheme of things, humans are really poor at knowing how big anything larger than their own hands is. Seriously, have yo ever walked into some friend's new apartment and in the first few seconds been able to say “I see you are renting 100 square meters”? If you claim that you can do that, then I want to test that ability because it is really abnormal.
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