It's been roughly ten years since astronomers and physicists were forced to face the reality of an invisible "dark energy" driving an acceleration of the expansion of the universe. Previous they had determined the existence of another dark force dubbed "dark matter," thought to hold the galaxies together.
Now, according to this release from NASA, they have a new problem to contend with:
Using data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), scientists have identified an unexpected motion in distant galaxy clusters.
"The clusters show a small but measurable velocity that is independent of the universe's expansion and does not change as distances increase," says lead researcher Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We never expected to find anything like this."
The source for this latest mysterious motion of matter in the cosmos may come from "gravitational attraction of matter that lies beyond the observable universe."
Kashlinsky calls this collective motion a "dark flow" in the vein of more familiar cosmological mysteries: dark energy and dark matter. "The distribution of matter in the observed universe cannot account for this motion," he says.
The finding flies in the face of predictions from standard cosmological models, which describe such motions as decreasing at ever greater distances.
Kashlinsky and his team suggest that their clusters are responding to the gravitational attraction of matter that was pushed far beyond the observable universe by inflation. "This measurement may give us a way to explore the state of the cosmos before inflation occurred," he says.
Inflation refers to the expansion of the universe, which is now know to be accelerating due to the mysterious dark energy.
Dark energy acts like an antigravity force. Some have proposed that a similar effect might be accessible at the scale of everyday experience, and account for the alleged antigravity observations of Podkletnov and others.
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