Evidence is growing that we don't just live in a universe. Rather, our universe is just one of many universes, in a bigger "multiverse".
As National Geographic reported Monday:
In 2008 scientists reported the discovery of hundreds of galaxy clusters streaming in the same direction at more than 2.2 million miles (3.6 million kilometers) an hour.
By way of background, I pointed out last May:
[One region of space] has such a massive gravitational pull, that it is pulling our entire galaxy and all of the nearby galaxies towards it at the speed of 1,000,000 miles an hour ...
We don't feel any movement because everything on Earth and in our galaxy is moving at the same speed. In other words, we don't feel the movement for the same reason that we don't feel the Earth rotate: everything around us is rotating at the same time.
Back to National Geographic:
This mysterious motion can't be explained by current models for distribution of mass in the universe. So the researchers made the controversial suggestion that the clusters are being tugged on by the gravity of matter outside the known universe.
Now the same team has found that the dark flow extends even deeper into the universe than previously reported: out to at least 2.5 billion light-years from Earth.
After using two additional years' worth of data and tracking twice the number of galaxy clusters, "we clearly see the flow, we clearly see it pointing in the same direction," said study leader Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
"It looks like a very coherent flow."
The find adds to the case that chunks of matter got pushed outside the known universe shortly after the big bang —which in turn hints that our universe is part of something larger: a multiverse.
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The new study is based on the collective motion of about 1,400 galaxy clusters, and seeing dark flow with the greater number of clusters gives the researchers more confidence in their result.***
Kashlinsky speculates that the dark flow extends "all the way across the visible universe," or about 47 billion light-years, which would fit with the notion that the clusters are being pulled by matter that lies beyond known horizons.
Dark flow, he said, "would be much more difficult to explain theoretically if it extended [2.5 billion light-years] and then just stopped."
In related news, Ben Bernanke changed the subject when asked if the dark matter outside of our universe is really off balance sheet liabilities of the U.S. government.
Note: An earlier National Geographic story makes it clear that the dark matter is only mysterious because it lies outside the boundary of the "known universe", in reference to the big bang:
The Big Bang is just religion disguised as science, and there really is no border to the universe.Current models say the known, or visible, universe—which extends as far as light could have traveled since the big bang—is essentially the same as the rest of space-time (the three dimensions of space plus time).
Michael Rivero, who doesn't buy into the big bang theory, argues that - instead of this evidence proving that we live in a multiverse - it may instead disprove the big bang. As Rivero writes in response to my essay:
What the evidence reported in the story is showing is that there is enough matter to create a gravity field detectable in the motions of the galaxies we can see from Earth, but the gravity field points to a source well outside the presumed edge of the universe which has been calculated from the observed red shift, which is assumed to be caused solely by relative velocity. But since the prime assumption is that our "banged" universe cannot reach that far, that there simply must be a wholly separate universe out there. Of curse, since "universe" means "all that there is", whatever is out there creating this gravity field is by definition part of this universe, which creates a paradox for the Big Bangers.
But here is another one that I postulated some time back for which no banger has yet had an answer.
When we gaze out into the night sky, we see galaxies extending into the distance as far as we can see, in every direction. The presumed size of the universe (and its age) keep getting revised as more distant objects get detected, but here it the problem. If the universe is finite, it should appear lopsided. In one direction we should see the end of the universe much more closely than the opposite direction, unless the Earth just happened to be in the exact center of that universe, and of course the odds against that are (pardon the expression) astronomical!
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The fact is that this latest discovery puts the final nail in the Big Bang model, even though the die-hard bangers will refuse to see it.
