‘Deep flow’ migrates deeper into the universe

‘Deep flow’ migrates deeper into the universe
Galaxy clusters zooming through space at speeds more than 1 million mph

By Clara Moskowitz
updated 6:01 p.m. ET, Thurs., March. 18, 2010

The puzzling migration of matter in deep space — dubbed "dark flow" — has been observed at farther distances than ever before, scientists have announced.

Distant galaxy clusters appear to be zooming through space at phenomenal speeds that surpass 1 million mph. The clusters were tracked to 2.5 billion light-years away — twice as far as earlier measurements.

This motion can't be explained by any known cosmic force, the researchers say. They suspect that whatever's tugging the matter may lie beyond our observable universe.

More:
www.msnbc.msn.com...

My guess?

Dread Lord Azathoth at the true universal center. A semi-sentient blackhole, a mindless god who dreams the world, tugging everything around towards him. "Him" being a placeholder pronoun -- such a beast, such a near-creator god, could not possibly have a gender. If we point our radio telescopes that way, we'll hear mad fluting...

Hey...since well paid scientists can't even begin to explain it, I'm throwing my fantastical explanation out there.

Everyone knows that bending space and time is supposedly the key to quick travel across the universe...at least in cheesy sci-fi it works.

Maybe we are watching aliens doing/done just that.

Why not...I'm sold.

Get Alex Collier in here.

reply to post by Mr Mask


Oooh, I like this theory too. We can only hope!

New crackpot theory: It is in fact our own observations which are drawing everythign in that direction; Observation has an unidentified effect, akin to gravity, which may actually help to explain various Quantum paradoxes. if we could see past the veil, to where the galaxies are headed, we would find... The other side of the Earth from where the telescope is! We have just happened to look in that very direction significantly more often than we have in any other direction. If we would look out from the earth truly uniformly, we would, no doubt, discover that such an effect ceased to occur.

reply to post by Pauligirl


So if they see them 2.5 billion light years away right now, that would mean it is actually much farther considering lights relatively low speed, unless they adjusted.

reply to post by Solasis


Or...maybe you were closer to the truth the first time.

Nyarlthotep is due this time of millennium...I think.

Still star n flag for the OP.

I do like the "Dark Flow" mystery.

Originally posted by Pauligirl

This motion can't be explained by any known cosmic force, the researchers say. They suspect that whatever's tugging the matter may lie beyond our observable universe.

Very interesting. Maybe the universe is even far larger than we imagine, we just can just yet see it all. Makes your head hurt.

reply to post by SmokeandShadow


Uh

Actually light is the fastest thing we have ever observed, and according to the theories ever can observe...

reply to post by Mr Mask


Yeah, either my first theory or your first theory is much more likely to be true than the "Universe of infinite regress" theory. It's rare to find something to think about that causes a larger headache than trying to picture an Outer God!

Damn universe why do you have to be so confusing.

I've been watching 'the universe' series, it's awesome.
Hopefully progress will just keep being made in these fields. God forbid we ever reach dead ends in all fields.

My crackpot theory is that the rest of the universe collapsing on itself and our little mostly empty pocket is getting pulled in.

I don't have any crackpot theories of my own but I did look at some facts.

Originally posted by Solasis
reply to post by SmokeandShadow

 

Actually light is the fastest thing we have ever observed, and according to the theories ever can observe...

No actually that's not exactly true, it is on a local basis, but not on a cosmic basis when we take the expansion of space into account:

en.allexperts.com...

the farther away we look, the faster do the major structures (..galaxies and galaxy clusters primarily) recede from our location. The actual figure currently stands at 70 km/sec more for every 3.26-billion light years farther away the object(s) is. Obviously there must be objects so far away that the recessional velocity will exceed the speed of light. BTW...this doesn't violate relativity because we're talking about the expansion velocity of space.

According to Wiki that figure of 70 was updated in 2009 to 74.2 km/s/Mpc.

The speed of light is 300,000 km/s so 300,000 / 74.2 = 4043 megaparsecs, so on average, galaxies further than that distance will have a recessional velocity greater than the speed of light (that's a little over 13 billion light years away, which may explain why we have trouble seeing further than that). However, let's say you look North and see recessional velocities near the speed of light going North. Then you look South and see recessional velocities near the speed of light going South. Aren't you observing those galaxies move away from each other at nearly twice the speed of light? So from that perspective I'd say it seems like we're observing relative movement faster than the speed of light.

Originally posted by SmokeandShadow
So if they see them 2.5 billion light years away right now, that would mean it is actually much farther considering lights relatively low speed, unless they adjusted.

Yes that's right. Note that 74.2km/sec recessional velocity per megaparsec (3.26 million light years) is the standard recessional velocity according to the Hubble constant.

They said it's 2.5 billion light years away, how many megaparsecs is that? (The hubble constant is expressed in megaparsecs so we need that value to apply the Hubble constant):
2,500,000,000 ly / (3.26164 ly/parsec) = 766 megaparsecs (Mpc)

Apply the Hubble Constant:

766 Mpc x 74.2 km/s/Mpc = 56,837 km/s

Convert to miles per hour:

56837 km/s * 60 = 3410232 km/minute
3410232 km/minute * 60 = 204,613,920 kph

1 kph = 0.621371192 mph

204,613,920 kph * 0.621371192 mph/kph = 127 million miles per hour

(which is about 19% of of the speed of light of 670616629 miles per hour)

So if you assume the velocity was constant (which is wasn't, but just to get some rough idea) you could figure out how far it traveled in 2.5 billion years going 127 million miles an hour away from us, which puts it a lot further than 2.5 billion light years away right now.


Now look at the article's statement:

www.msnbc.msn.com...

Distant galaxy clusters appear to be zooming through space at phenomenal speeds that surpass 1 million mph.

So let me ask you, if the Hubble constant has those galaxies zipping away from us at 127 million miles per hour, what's so fast about the 1 million miles per hour this article references? That doesn't seem too fast compared to the 127,000,000 miles an hour that the average matter in the universe moves away from us at that distance, does it? I understand they may be talking about local movement, but still 1 million mph doesn't seem all that fast to me for a galaxy velocity, relative to what? All velocities are relative to something. and also note this:

The notion is a controversial one because it has only been measured by one group of scientists in one set of data so far.

We understand why this idea is so annoying at times," said study leader Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "In fact, part of the motivation for our ongoing project was precisely to rule it out. But it is in the data, we don't see it going away."

So not much (is there any?) confirmation, and acknowledgment that it's controversial. I think the jury is still out on this one folks.

[edit on 19-3-2010 by Arbitrageur]

reply to post by Pauligirl

‘Deep flow’ migrates deeper into the universe Galaxy clusters zooming through space at speeds more than 1 million mph!!! OMG!!!

Hiya PG, just doing my usual SnF for one my favourite members...bit of a drive-by posting as it's hard to be constructive on such grand-scale inexplicability...

We've got a leak in here somewhere or those distant galaxies have found a better party to attend. Seriously...it's fascinating information and way beyond my limited comprehension or understanding of astrophysics. Cool thread

Hello all this is my first post here. I've been coming to the site for a while now and found the first thread that I had to add in on..

My theory is that the Universe(As far as we can see, but since we can't see the light instantaneously it's not really what is there when we look at it..) is part of a much larger entity or organism. Not implying that it's living, which it may very well be, but that there's a macrocosm far greater than what we can comprehend.

Imagine seeing our universe from outside of itself. It's really impossible without being somewhere to see it from. It's got to be infinitely large and infinitely small.

In my own opinion, that is .

This is a fascinating find, S&F.

I have to think it's probably some sort of optical illusion of some sort due to the bending of space/time. I dunno though, this is literally unimagineable.

Here's an explanation of what it is that "draws" the matter towards a specific direction. Something alternative to the scientific theories that have been formulated so far. It presupposes however a universe which is trillions of years old...

The Eternal Isle of Paradise

Illustration

2nd Illustration

Alexander

Since none of this seems to make sense to scientists or especially me, why don't they just come out and say time doesn't exist after 14 billion years to the observer; similar to a visibility affect. It's there, just not visible to us. Time and Space, some say it's one in the same. Or our universe is just the "crust" of another greater universe which is round. We have a hard time seeing beyond, perhaps it is due to space curving around the other round universe in which we cannot see. Reminds me of everyone saying the world was flat and that if you went to the edge you would fall off. Maybe what we are trying to see is "around the bend". I know that light bends with space, creating an illusion of sorts.

Or maybe our universe looks something kind of like this. Maybe we live in the yellow sponge area, or our universe lies in the spaces between the sponge, I like to picture the spaces between a 4th dimension though, reminds me of wormholes, invisible to us, due to it lying outside our viewable universe which would be the yellow sponge area.

Possible Representation of our Universe

I apologize if this post is off topic, your thread really got me thinking! Star and Flag for feeding me information I did not know.

Knowledge is power!!!!

[edit on 19-3-2010 by milkmustache]

reply to post by Pauligirl


My guess would be attraction by a parallel universe or membrane or brane as string theory describes it. The branes are like pages in a book (yes there is more than one universe according to string theory). The branes also move in relationship to each other and if they touch, the cause a big bang and move away from each other (or bounce) forming a cycle. The really interesting thing is that if you look at the diagram below, some physicists believe black holes can span branes which would explain were the missing matter went. This also means gravity or gravitons can span branes which means we may be able to communicate with other brane universes, e.g. morse code as a starting point hehe. If there is an acceleration occurring it might mean the branes are getting closer and if they touch, we will get a new big bang "restarting" our perceived universe.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/9a629793dc98.jpg[/atsimg]

If they are observing a phenomenon taking place 2.5 billion light-years away, then that means they are observing an event that took place 2.5 billion years ago. Whatever is (was) happening is of little importance to us, since 2.5 billion years have passed.

1 million mph isn't really that fast. Right now, the Earth (and the entire solar system) are traveling around the galaxy at about 492,125 mph, so almost half a million miles per hour.

Now if something was moving near the speed of light, that's when to be amazed.

Perhaps the universe is a static loop.

en.wikipedia.org...

This possibility was first raised by Kurt Gödel in 1949, who discovered a solution to the equations of general relativity (GR) allowing CTCs known as the Gödel metric, and since then other GR solutions containing CTCs have been found, such as the Tipler cylinder and traversable wormholes. If CTCs exist, their existence would seem to imply at least the theoretical possibility of time travel backwards in time...

en.wikipedia.org...

According to Hawking and Ellis, another remarkable feature of this spacetime is the fact that, if we suppress the inessential y coordinate, light emitted from an event on the world line of a given dust particle spirals outwards, forms a circular cusp, then spirals inward and reconverges at a subsequent event on the world line of the original dust particle. This means that observers looking orthogonally to the \vec[e]_2 direction can see only finitely far out, and also see themselves at an earlier time.

If anyone spots the Milky Way Galaxy out there in deep space (at an earlier point in time), let me know!