The Ash Twins Blog

Dark flow.

Along with dark matter and dark energy, astronomers can now add dark flow to the lexicon of cosmic mysteries. Researchers have discovered that 700 distant clusters of galaxies, gas, and dust are all being pulled in the same direction, apparently toward something invisible and possibly very large, confounding current cosmological models. So far, what that “something” is remains speculative, but it could turn out to be a vestige of the universe’s earliest days…

The researchers had been surveying the motion of 700 clusters of galaxies to test an unrelated astronomical phenomenon when they made a startling discovery: All 700 clusters are flowing basically in the same direction and at speeds of as much as 1000 kilometers per second–or more than 30 times faster than Earth revolves around the sun. As the team reports in this week’s online edition of Astrophysical Journal Letters, the clusters, which appear headed toward a region of the sky where the constellation Centaurus resides, are moving faster than they should be if their acceleration were due only to dark energy, the mysterious force discovered a decade ago that is slowly ripping the cosmos apart.

To quote Sir Arthur Eddington, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

For a primer on dark matter, check this out.