A totally off-topic post

From SiliconValley.com:

Speaking of the big bang, cosmic researchers have a new curiosity to puzzle over. Seems there are patches of matter (specifically giant galaxy clusters) that are steadily hustling along at nearly 2 million miles per hour in a direction separate from the overall expansion of the universe, moving in a way that cannot be explained by the known gravitational forces of the observable universe. Which means, scientists suspect, that whatever is causing the movement is outside the observable universe. For the moment, they're calling it the "dark flow." Not that we've actually seen to the edge of the universe, but since the place appears to be about 13.7 billion years old, and the speed of light is fixed (more or less), that's as far back as we'll ever be able to peer. Under the "inflation" theory, the big bang pumped up a bit of space-time into our universe, like a bubble in pancake batter (mmm, pancakes). The farthest we can ever see is the edge of the bubble; who knows what might be in the pancake. "The structures responsible for this motion have been pushed so far away by inflation -- I would guesstimate they may be hundreds of billions of light years away -- that we cannot see even with the deepest telescopes because the light emitted there could not have reached us in the age of the universe," said research leader Alexander Kashlinsky, "Most likely, to create such a coherent flow they would have to be some very strange structures, maybe some warped space time. But this is just pure speculation." Fun, though, eh?

Posted by George Moneo at September 24, 2008 07:27 PM

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