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.'"
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=-
Don't tell anyone, but when contrasting known information against an infinite cosmos...the average scientist is basically as clueless as the rest of us.
-=Bang Bang=-
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.
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...
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.
Your reasoning is trapped by trying to imagine the universe as some defined boundary expanding. It's the same reasoning that images the Big Bang as an explosion in space.
The bang wasn't an explosion in spacetime, it was an explosion of spacetime. The expansion of space just means that the metric which measures distance between two points that stay at the same location changes. As time passes, two points which stay at the same location on some hypothetical reference grid will first measure one foot apart, then two, then five, etc. They aren't going anywhere, they're being carried along on space itself.
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....
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.