Slashdot Mirror
"Dark Flow" Outside Observable Universe
DynaSoar writes "NASA astrophysicists have discovered what they claim is something outside the observable universe exerting an effect on the observable. The material is pulling clusters of galaxies towards a region of space known not to contain sufficient matter to create the effect. They can only speculate on what the material is and how space might differ there: '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.'"
We are going to continue to find things that we don't know about, because the Universe goes forever. Let me repeat that, FOREVER. Just because there may be an edge to what we think the Universe is doesn't mean that things just end there. It isn't rocket surgery, it is logic. If the known universe is expanding outward, that means that it has to have someplace to go, right?
Or am I just high right now?
I'm actually pretty excited at this news. Granted, my understanding of astrophysics is limited to Hawking books and guests of George Noory (kidding, kind of). But I look forward to anything that seems to pin down the concept of 'dark matter'.
Dark matter to me has always smacked of a Victorian Era flimflam artist talking about the aether. And I don't care how dapper Mortimer T. Snerd is dressed, I'm not drinking his dark matter kool-aid until I can get a better explination for it than 'its invisible, supermassive, unobservable, and so totally there'. If you can't explain it to me, the interested layman, you may need to put your theory back in the crucible o' truth. Its probably not done yet.
-=Bang Bang=-
The universe is mmuch more complex than the average scientist lets on.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
You can't see ships past the YOUR horizon, but those ships could certainly see other ships that you can't see that are beyond YOUR horizon, but not theirs.
i think it's kinda cool. the idea that there are even more massive structures out there than what's in our observable universe is really quite mind-boggling. but without stars and galaxies i wonder what kind of emergent structures or phenomena could exist beyond our observable bubble.
i'm guessing it's probably not possible for biological life to form in such a radically different environment, but then again maybe i just lack the imagination to conceive of such possibilities. it seems like within our observable universe for any biological life to evolve it must follow certain patterns dictated by the laws of physics/chemistry. but if space-time in these regions is so different from our observable universe then who knows? our level of consciousness compared to what exists out there might be like comparing an amoeba with a blue whale. even the time scales experienced by other life forms could be drastically different from ours. entire civilizations could spring forth and flicker out of existence all in the blink of an eye.
but since we can't even observe what is out there maybe this is all pointless speculation.
What NASA really meant to say was, "Shit, we just found something else that does not fit our current model of the universe. Lets just make some stuff up and call it a new discovery"
Maybe this time people will wake up.....probably not.
http://bigbangneverhappened.org/
Yes I know, but we can see the galaxies travelling under the effect of this supposed dark flow. If we can see the galaxies being affected by these superstructures, then the light travelling to us from the galaxies which we now see left after the causal influence reached them, which means the causal influence had time to reach /us/. Which means the super structures aren't in the unobservable universe...
Dark + Science = We have no clue what's going on please fund us
Disclosure: I'm a heavy advocate of funding the sciences and a scientist myself. But seriously guys, just admit it if you don't have a clue;)
To put it from my freshman chem course:
If someone talks about:
Yuan-Teller distortion - 50% chance bullshit
Second-Order Yuan-Teller distortion - 100% chance bullshit
Pseudo-Second-Order Yuan-Teller distortion - You are being mocked.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
To paraphrase David Hume: There is no reason to believe that the laws of physics have always been what they are today at all points in space and at all points in time. While it is well within reason, and quite likely, that the Universe follows neat patterns quite specifically, when one runs into really odd data that doesn't fit into your tidy boxes it might be time to rethink things. Dark matter/flow/energy or whatever the new buzzwords scientists come up with are stop gap measures meant to really say, "we haven't the foggiest idea what's going on, but it doesn't quite add up".
Burn Hollywood Burn
If we are observing far-away galaxies being affected by the stuff too far away for us to observe directly, maybe we are observing the stuff outside our bubble indirectly? This visibility can be transitive?
Also, maybe we can also "observe" the stuff outside our bubble via the effects of "spooky action at a distance"?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
fail.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
I would like to counterpoint that I don't believe in your mind, and this post was never posted. It just was.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
First we had dark energy, then dark matter, now dark flow. All to try and explain an unexpected effect of something we don't understand. Lets figure out what exactly gravity is and how it really works over large scales, then we can revisit all this "dark" stuff.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
No.
Anything outside our observable universe cannot affect us without FTL velocities being involved. The observable universe, however, is centred on whatever is doing the observing. Therefore, things we can see from here have their own observable universe and, thus, their own set of stuff by which they can be affected.
Poor ananlogy: imagine you can see a cat sitting on a street corner. It disappears around the corner because it can see some tuna. You can't see the tuna and are therefore unaffected by it (let's assume that you can't smell it either), but it's apparent to the cat.
Well, that question seems unanswerable if you are unable to accept 'God' for example. (Note that I am mentioning 'God' here, not any specific ones. Different people have their own beliefs regarding the specifics of 'God' and I don't want to end up in some religion vs religion argument)
Basically if I accept 'God', then I would also accept that perhaps that God can't be fully understood with our model of science.
Perhaps God created us with a box around us. Everything we know, can know and will know in the future exists within this box. Of course, this raises the question where, if God is outside the box, then how is it that we know about him?
I really don't know how to answer that question. I have not thought about it very much.
But if I were to reject the notion of 'God'. Then it also becomes a case of 'turtles all the way down'.
It becomes a question of 'who created matter (and anti-matter) ?' . Even if we are able to answer the question, like perhaps 'Due to conditions of X, matter and anti-matter was created', then the question becomes 'so how did condition X happen?'
Basically you can't really answer anything because if we were to take the position that everything has to be created by something else, then nothing can be created.
If everything has to be created by something else, then the creator of the created needs a creator as well. That's where you get into 'Turtles all the way down'.
i think life is possible in almost any kind of environment. just look at the so called fragile state of life as we know it - bacteria that thrives in nuclear reactors and in boiling water. from what i've obversed life isn't fragile OR rare, but tough enough to adapt to anything and populating to the extent it seems like a cosmic imperitive.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
This is why examples fail. There is no physical "horizon" like there would be on earth, the only "horizon" is time and the speed of light. To try to repair the ships example, the horizon would be expanding away at cannonball speed, thus when you see the first ship hit by a cannonball, you should logically bee able to see the ship that fired it at the same time, if not earlier. Thus if you see a ship hit by a cannonball, and don't see the ship that fired it, you might assume that the cannonball somehow travelled above cannonball speed. Or not, since this example isn't complete: The ocean is also expanding between you and the ships, and betwen the two other ships. To summerize, the naval analogy isn't really optimal for this problem.
It's contradictory anyway. If we're seeing something influenced by it, then we ARE observing it. That's what observation MEAN.
If you're "watching" something, you're really interpreting electrical signals generated by your retina in response to chemical reactions triggered by photons, nothing "direct" about it whatsoever.
So saying we're seeing something being influenced by something outside the observable universe is nonsense.
Yep you're right, but *I think* they're talking about a different horizon to the one you're thinking of (the summary doesn't make this clear).
The furthest back we can see is the CMBR, due to the Universe being opaque any earlier on. This opacity creates a horizon at a slightly shorter distance than the horizon you would get due to the fact that light/changes in gravity fields propagate at c.
The abstract (linked below) mentions that they suspect it is gravitational influences from beyond the CMBR barrier (but before the speed of light barrier) that is producing the effect:
"... and may be indicative of the tilt exerted across the entire current horizon by far-away pre-inflationary inhomogeneities." ... at least that's how I translate the above.
Humans are insignificant for the terms of the universe, but we at least strive to understand it.
We haven't yet fully understood the universe, and even if we do it's so large that it's hard to fathom the span of it.
And did the universe really exist before the big bang or was it created by the big bang? How can one prove something that is hypothetical if we don't have something to measure it against?
Anyway - it is possible that what attracts matter is nothing more than an inert part of matter - or more specific a black hole that currently is invisible because it has consumed all matter near itself a long time ago.
The Big Bang wasn't a "perfect" explosion, and if it had been we wouldn't have had the distribution of galaxies that we have - it would have been a cloud of gas. And since we haven't had a perfect explosion it is possible that the black hole was created at a very early stage of our universe.
But who knows in reality?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Must be grant-writing season. Fairy-tales compounding fantasy multiplying speculation. I believe it's dark chocolate not dark matter that attracts medium-scale astronomical structures. That and strawberries ....
Therefore, claiming that there could be "giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe" just outside this bubble seems somewhat... convenient.
"giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe" is the new "here be dragons".
You just got troll'd!
First, the region that these clusters are supposedly moving towards are pretty close to being in line with the heart of the Milky Way. What this means is that the attractor object may simply be obscured by our own galaxy.
It's not just the lack of an attractor object, it's the unusual velocities.
Second, the motion is not unusually large for superclusters.
They argue otherwise: "If produced by gravitational instability within the concordance LambdaCDM model, the motion would require the local Universe out to ~ 300h^1 Mpc to be atypical at the level of many standard deviations of the model", and argue that even a 100 km/sec motion due to local gravitation alone would be excluded by observations. I confess that I don't know enough cosmology to understand why. Either you expect smaller motions in the earlier universe or else there are additional constraints at work (they mention having to explain why the dipole is approximately constant with depth). I'd have to do more background reading to understand what's going on here, but the point is that they say they have reason to believe that the motion is unusually large.
What really bothers me here is the claim that these bodies are still experiencing forces from the long departed rest of the universe.
I don't think they are. From my reading of the paper, it sounds like this motion is left over from the inflationary phase.
... bacteria that thrives in nuclear reactors and in boiling water.
Most extremophiles are archaea rather than bacteria.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
If God did create the universe he must exist beyond that universe and thus even bigger than the universe.
Religion would thus make you feel even smaller.
WOW, I am quite spiritual, I feel even smaller than you.
Slowly waving my hand - "This is not the sig you are looking for."
Yes, it would. Gravity works at lightspeed also, so any gravitic effect on an observable object must be detectable at the observer, making the influencing object "observable".
Well, let's set aside for a moment the fact that we have not yet measured the speed of gravity accurately enough to tell if it is equal, above, or below the speed of light. We'll just assume it's equal.
Now that I've given it some post coffee thought, you are, of course, correct. My error was that I was considering the light cones of transmitting influence both from the "unobservable" object, and from Earth. I was looking at the wrong half of the light cone.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!