In 2008, A NASA scientist and his research team announced their discovery of clusters of galaxies far apart from one another appearing to be moving in the same direction.
What is so special about this? The discovery contradicted the standard model of the universe which says that mass within our universe should flow in random directions. This led to so many questions running through the researchers minds. Maybe another universe exists beyond the bounds of ours dragging our stars closer through the pull of gravity. This became known as the “dark flow” theory.
The researchers at UB have done some studies recently which ultimately disproved this theory. They found that exploding stars in different parts of the universe do not seem to be moving in the same direction.
The data they worked with involved 557 stars called supernovae. While the stars around Earth shared a common motion in one direction the stars further out did not. The stars were pronounced 680 million light years away from Earth.
“Our result is boring, in a way, because it matches your expectation for the standard cosmological model,” said UB physicist William Kinney. “If it turns out that the NASA team led by Alexander Kashlinsky is right, it would be exciting because there would be some crazy thing going on that nobody understood. There would have to be something very radical, like a big mass outside of our universe that’s pulling on stuff inside our universe. That would be big news.”
She continued by saying that their data does not match; they are merely muddying the water because it is not clear who is right yet. An article announcing the research results will appear in an upcoming edition of the peer-reviewed Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
Photo: Space.com