So I promised a story last time and as I took a brief restroom break from my homework, I chanced to read in the magazine Astronomy a brief article regarding "dark flow." Dark flow is a term coined by a researcher whose team discovered something I think is one of the coolest things ever. Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center, and his team discovered that at least 700 massive galaxy clusters (a large number of galaxies relatively close together) are all moving as groups towards a single point in the sky!
Let me use a different example in case you didn't follow that. Imagine if 700 million people on Earth were all inexplicably pulled 20ft towards the Space Needle here in Seattle. It's something like that, only they keep moving. Can you imagine how crazy this is? At least 700 individual galactic clusters are all moving towards one point! It's hypothesized that there is a concentration of mass beyond the observable universe that is exercising a force on these clusters. It's rather beyond me the size of this mass you would have to have to be able to do all this. My mind is blown.
Kashlinsky named this phenomenon dark flow to reference dark energy and dark matter, two other great mysteries. Obviously of course, there is much research to do still and this might be a ginourmous coincidence. So, don't quote me. I just wanted to share an article.
Source: Astronomy January 2009 p.31
1 comment:
Fascinating, no doubt.
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