Distant galaxy clusters mysteriously stream at a million miles per hour
along a path roughly centered on the southern constellations Centaurus
and Hydra. A new study led by Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., tracks this collective motion --
dubbed the "dark flow" -- to twice the distance originally reported.
"This is not something we set out to find, but we cannot make it go away," Kashlinsky said. "Now we see that it persists to much greater distances -- as far as 2.5 billion light-years away." The new study appears in the March 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The clusters appear to be moving along a line extending from our solar system toward Centaurus/Hydra, but the direction of this motion is less certain. Evidence indicates that the clusters are headed outward along this path, away from Earth, but the team cannot yet rule out the opposite flow. "We detect motion along this axis, but right now our data cannot state as strongly as we'd like whether the clusters are coming or going," Kashlinsky said.
The dark flow is controversial because the distribution of matter in the observed universe cannot account for it. Its existence suggests that some structure beyond the visible universe -- outside our "horizon" -- is pulling on matter in our vicinity.
Cosmologists regard the microwave background -- a flash of light emitted 380,000 years after the universe formed -- as the ultimate cosmic reference frame. Relative to it, all large-scale motion should show no preferred direction.
Source: Francis Reddy, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center (via EurekAlert)
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