“We’re looking at a tug-of-war with dark energy and gravity trying to expand or collapse the universe.” John Carlstrom, South Pole astronomer and University of Chicago astrophysicist. A big telescope, as high as a seven-story building, with a main mirror measuring 32 1/2 feet across is being built at the Amundsen-Scott Station in the Antarctica looming over a barren plain of ice that gets colder than anywhere else on the planet. The instrument at the far end of the world is being built scientists can search for clues that might identify the most powerful, plentiful but elusive substance in the...
Pulsar observation opens new window on stellar evolution China’s Shenzhou-7 - Debate Over Mission MessagesInterstellar Boundary Explorer: New Observatory Set to Scan Solar System's Edge NASA's Robotic LasertankGhostly glow reveals galaxy clusters in collision Jupiter Could Be Out to Get Us ...
Here's something mind-blowing I just reported for Discovery News. It's from way, way, way beyond Earth. But it's so totally strange that I had to share it so you can comment on it. The original story with videos, etc., is posted here. Sept. 25, 2008 -- Astronomers have stumbled upon an unexplained two-million-mile-per-hour sideways shift in the universe toward a colossal, unseen, unknown gravity source beyond the horizon of the observable universe. What's being called a dark flow appears to be pulling vast clusters of galaxies toward a 20-degree-wide patch of sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela....
There is a force called "dark flow" that exists outside our universe, and it's tugging several galaxy clusters at 2 million mph toward an empty spot in space between Centaurus (pictured) and Vela. This isn't like dark matter, which exerts a more localized pull: Dark flow is a force that's operating at a universe level to push enormous chunks of matter around. Writing in Astrophysical Journal Letters, a group of astronomers say that this dark flow comes from a place where constants like time don't exist — nor do stars and galaxies. According to Space.com: The scientists deduced that...
Almost six billion years ago, two of the largest gravitational structures in the universe slammed into each other with velocities in the millions of miles per hour. Galactic clusters are collections of galaxies (sometimes thousands of them) that seem to hang together in violation of the known laws of physics. Not only did this ancient collision result in a stunningly beautiful image, but it's given astrophysicists an important clue about the nature of dark matter. The image above is a composite, combining data from the Hubble Space Telescope with x-ray imagery from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Hubble captured the blue...
A distant cousin of the famous "bullet cluster" shows the same separation of dark and ordinary matter occurring as its two parent galaxy clusters collide at high speed....
European Space Agency's orbiting X-ray observatory XMM-Newton has provided astronomers a glimpse of the largest cluster of galaxies ever seen in the distant, early universe. The discovery of this far-off group, estimated to contain a thousand times the mass of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, offers further proof of the existence of the enigmatic force called dark energy."This is the most luminous, and therefore probably the most massive, cluster of galaxies discovered at this epoch," said Georg Lamer of the Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam in Germany, who led the team. "The light we observe started about 7.7 billion years...
