Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Dark Flow may be sucking in huge portions of our Universe

You ready for something REALLY freaky? Forget about dark matter, lets consider for a moment DARK FLOW. Hair on the back of your neck standing up yet? No? It will. An article in IO9 writes that: there is a force called "dark flow" that exists outside our universe, and it's tugging several galaxy clusters at 2 million mph toward an empty spot in space. Unlike the localized pull of dark matter, Dark flow is a force that's operating at a universe level to push enormous chunks of matter around. And weirder yet: a group of astronomers say that this dark flow comes from a place where constants like time don't exist — nor do stars and galaxies. Our part of the cosmos, our universe may in fact be only a small bubble of space time. There could be other parts of the cosmos beyond this bubble that we cannot see. In these regions, space-time might be very different, and likely doesn't contain stars and galaxies. It could include giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe. These structures are what researchers suspect are tugging on the galaxy clusters, causing the dark flow. One reason that we may not be able to see even a hint of these structures or other regions is that they have been pushed so far away by the initial expansion of our universe that the time it would take light from these areas takes longer than our universe is old to reach us.

<- io9 article via space.com article ->

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