This got teased via email as being about structures “outside the universe, in a place where time, stars, galaxies, and space as we know it no longer exist.” That seems to confuse the universe as such with the observable universe – but still:
Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can’t be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon “dark flow.” The stuff that’s pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude. When scientists talk about the observable universe, they don’t just mean as far out as the eye, or even the most powerful telescope, can see. In fact there’s a fundamental limit to how much of the universe we could ever observe, no matter how advanced our visual instruments.
That limit is set by whether light can reach us from whereever it’s coming from. Anything that’s farther away than the speed of light times how long it’s been traveling to us – which is no longer than the age of the universe – is fundamentally beyond our ability to detect. And we seem to have even less of a clue than we thought about what’s out there:
A theory called inflation posits that the universe we see is just a small bubble of space-time that got rapidly expanded after the Big Bang. 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 (which only formed because of the particular density pattern of mass in our bubble). 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.
Good times.
References:
* Mysterious New ‘Dark Flow’ Discovered in Space [Space.com]
Previously:
* Neat – Virgin Galactic Building Giant Spaceport In New Mexico
* Neat – Germs Taken To Space So They Can Mutate, Come Back Deadlier
* Space Exploration Is Worth It
