Dark Matter

[Guest jamongo]

I have recently read of a small group of galaxies that appear to be accelerating toward some distant unseen area. It is speculated that this area might contain a large object much larger than anything we know of today. (I apologize for not having the reference for this article. I was on a different computer away from home and screwed up when I tried to send it to my home computer.)

If such a huge objects do indeed exist, is it plausible to suspect it possible that this is the "missing" matter that the scientists are upset about? That the galaxies are speeding away at an increasing speed due to the pull of gravity from these huge objects?

[7DSUSYstrings]

Dark matter of its own is both perplexing and speculative. Just its presence in the equation changes so many things. Accepted theories from one camp are dismissed, or drastically modified at best, while the ideas outside the mainstream may become the new mainstream. It may be dark matter/energy exists at the center of every atom, perhaps even every prime particle.

[Pincho Paxton]

Dark Flow is what you are referring to. The large object much larger than anything we know of today, I have never heard mentioned.

Edited April 21, 2012 by Pincho Paxton

[7DSUSYstrings]

Another thought crossed my mind in a conversation I was having with an electronics expert about the existence of electric fields. Any dark matter object would likely not only be invisible because it either deflects or absorbs light, but it would be opaque as well. If it were to exist in the center of the universe, it would obscure any galactic or intergalactic material on its other side.

 

1. It would be likely it was in the center and, being so highly energetic as to either absorb or deflect light at a distance, its rotating velocity would be well above any universal limb we might reside in (another possible cause of invisibility)

 

and

 

2. it would change the dimensional constants if the universe has a finite mass.

[Cyberia]

I have recently read of a small group of galaxies that appear to be accelerating toward some distant unseen area. It is speculated that this area might contain a large object much larger than anything we know of today. (I apologize for not having the reference for this article. I was on a different computer away from home and screwed up when I tried to send it to my home computer.)

If such a huge objects do indeed exist, is it plausible to suspect it possible that this is the "missing" matter that the scientists are upset about? That the galaxies are speeding away at an increasing speed due to the pull of gravity from these huge objects?

 

 

The objects are not accelerating but travelling at a constant speed so they are not being pulled towards an unknown object. The article:

 

"Dark Flow" sounds like a new SciFi Channel series. It's not! Back in the Middle Ages, maps showed terrifying images of sea dragons at the boundaries of the known world. Today, scientists have observed strange new motion at the very limits of the known universe - kind of where you'd expect to find new things, but they still didn't expect this. A huge swath of galactic clusters seem to be heading to a cosmic hotspot and nobody knows why.

 

The unexplained motion has hundreds of millions of stars dashing towards a certain part of the sky at over eight hundred kilometers per second. Not much speed in cosmic terms, but the preferred direction certainly is: most cosmological models have things moving in all directions equally at the extreme edges of the universe. Something that could make things aim for a specific spot on such a massive scale hasn't been imagined before. The scientists are keeping to the proven astrophysical strategy of calling anything they don't understand "dark", terming the odd motion a "dark flow".

 

A black hole can't explain the observations - objects would accelerate into the hole, while the NASA scientists see constant motion over a vast expanse of a billion light-years. You have no idea how big that is. This is giant on a scale where it's not just that we can't see what's doing it; it's that the entire makeup of the universe as we understand it can't be right if this is happening.

 

Which is fantastic! Such discoveries force a whole new set of ideas onto the table which, even if they turn out to be wrong, are the greatest ways to advance science and our understanding of everything. One explanation that's already been offered is that our universe underwent a period of hyper-inflation early in its existence, and everything we think of as the vast and infinite universe is actually a small corner under the sofa of the real expanse of reality. Which would be an amazing, if humbling, discovery.

 

 

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/08/dark-flow-discovered-at-edge-of-the-universe-hundreds-of-millions-of-stars-racing-toward-an-cosmic-h.html

 

 

This show of things contracting over such a huge area is a serious blow to the big bang which talks of expansion.

[Lancewen]

The objects are not accelerating but traveling at a constant speed so they are not being pulled towards an unknown object. The article:

 

http://www.dailygala...n-cosmic-h.html

 

This show of things contracting over such a huge area is a serious blow to the big bang which talks of expansion.

 

I'm starting to see articles that are disputing if the dark flow really exist. I can only speculate that if it does exist, those clusters and super clusters appear to be in an incredibly large orbit to some incredibly massive object that is beyond our current ability to observe.

[Cyberia]

The idea that the Dark Flow does not exist is wishful thinking on the part off big bangers.

 

The largest void we have found so far is some 3.5 billion light years across and we have walls of hundreds of millions of galaxies. If the Universe is as young as claimed, then how did such things occur in a Universe smoothed out by inflation and expanding into literally nothing, so no bias?

 

Tiny perturbations only occur in tea bags.

[cuzbro]

It seems that some galaxies swirl similar to that of cyclones on Earth or water going down a drain. The direction is dependent on whether it occurs in the northern or southern hemisphere and is due to the Coriolis effect from the spinning of the Earth. What determines the direction of a galaxy spinning?

[Moontanman]

The idea that the Dark Flow does not exist is wishful thinking on the part off big bangers.

 

The largest void we have found so far is some 3.5 billion light years across and we have walls of hundreds of millions of galaxies. If the Universe is as young as claimed, then how did such things occur in a Universe smoothed out by inflation and expanding into literally nothing, so no bias?

 

Tiny perturbations only occur in tea bags.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_flow

 

Criticisms

 

Astrophysicist Ned Wright posted an online response to the study arguing that its methods are flawed.[6] The authors of the "dark flow" study released a statement in return, refuting three of Wright's five arguments and identifying the remaining two as a typo and a technicality that do not affect the measurements and their interpretation.[7]

A more recent statistical work done by Ryan Keisler[8] claims to rule out the possibility that the dark flow is a physical phenomenon because Kashlinsky et al. do not consider primary CMB anisotropies as important as they are.

NASA's Goddard Space Center considered that this could be the effect of a sibling universe or a region of space-time fundamentally different from the observable universe. Data on more than 1,000 galaxy clusters have been measured, including some as distant as 3 billion light-years. Alexander Kashlinsky claims these measurements show the universe's steady flow is clearly not a statistical fluke. Kashlinsky said: "At this point we don't have enough information to see what it is, or to constrain it. We can only say with certainty that somewhere very far away the world is very different than what we see locally. Whether it's 'another universe' or a different fabric of space-time we don't know."[9]

The existence and the velocity of dark flow will probably stay disputed until the new accurate cosmic microwave background radiation data by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite are available in 2012.[10]

 

I'm not sure that wishful thinking is the correct way to term this effect or lack there of but more along the lines of the data is still not conclusive one way or another.

[Lancewen]

It seems that some galaxies swirl similar to that of cyclones on Earth or water going down a drain. The direction is dependent on whether it occurs in the northern or southern hemisphere and is due to the Coriolis effect from the spinning of the Earth. What determines the direction of a galaxy spinning?

 

Probably the original spin motion of the supermassive black hole core determines the direction of the galaxy's spin. But you have to realize galaxies don't have any particular orientation to the rest of the universe. For example if your view of a galaxy shows a clockwise spin, try and imagine viewing it from the other side. I'm betting it would be a counter clockwise spin.