Unknown "Structures" Tugging at Universe

~NASA astrophysicists at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland recently reported some astounding results during a large-scale survey of galaxies in the universe. Simply put: rather than the galaxies all moving away from each other as expected according to the Big Bang Theory (no no, not that Big Bang Theory), much of the matter in the universe seems to be moving in the same direction: towards some massive object(s) beyond the boundary of the visible universe, pulling at everything like an immense magnet.

The study was an analysis of information from a previous study, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which mapped out the intensity of cosmic microwave background radiation throughout the visible sky. The cosmic background radiation, assumed to be a byproduct of the big bang, contains temperature fluctuations which also reveal the velocity of distant galaxies. The expected result of the new study was that the farther away distant galaxy clusters are from us, the slower their motion would appear to us on Earth.

However, what the scientists discovered was quite different: rather than an apparent slowdown, the galaxy clusters (such as the Bullet Cluster pictured above, some 3.8 billion miles away) are all moving at the same speed, about two million miles per hour, and more importantly, they are moving in the same direction.

The phenomenon has been nicknamed "dark flow" by Alexander Kashlinsky, the lead scientist on the study (apparently because if you can't account for something in astronomy, you just add "dark" in front of it). The tentative hypothesis to explain the phenomenon is that the rapid inflation of the early universe just after the big bang pushed large amounts of matter beyond the cosmological horizon; as the inflation of the universe slowed to what it is today, the matter continues to be pushed "outside" of what we can see. Another theory is that some as-yet-undiscovered curvature of space results in the apparent movement in one direction.

Still, if these controversial findings hold up, the cosmological implications would force us to reevaluate key aspects of Big Bang Theory, which is currently the leading cosmological model. The current theory assumes that space has near-identical properties everywhere in the universe, but if matter (and therefore space) exist beyond the visible universe, they have to be accounted for somehow in our model of cosmology.

The complete study was published in the October 20 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, a peer-reviewed astrophysics journal. You can look at the published article in PDF format here, but be warned that it's heavy on physics.

My theory is that the galaxies are all very hungry, hence their movement towards a certain restaurant.