Something beyond visible universe detected?

Sci­en­tists have meas­ured an un­ex­pected mo­tion in dis­tant clus­ters of ga­lax­ies—pos­sibly caused, they say, by the gravita­t­ional pull of some­thing out­side the vis­i­ble uni­verse. “We nev­er ex­pected to find an­y­thing like this,” said lead re­search­er Al­ex­an­der Kash­lin­sky of NASA’s God­dard Space Flight Cen­ter in Green­belt, Md.

We can see only those areas of the cos­mos close enough that their light could have reached us dur­ing our uni­verse’s ex­ist­ence. What lies past those lim­its, if an­y­thing, has been un­clear.

Kash­linksy and col­leagues sug­gest what­ev­er is pulling on the mys­te­ri­ously mov­ing gal­axy clus­ters might lie out­side the vis­i­ble uni­verse.

A re­port on the find­ings is to ap­pear this week in the elec­tron­ic edi­tion of As­t­ro­phys­i­cal Jour­nal Let­ters.

“The clus­ters show a small but meas­ur­a­ble ve­locity that is in­de­pend­ent of the uni­verse’s ex­pan­sion,” Kash­lin­sky said.

The re­sults are based on da­ta from a NASA sat­el­lite, the Wilkin­son Mi­cro­wave An­i­sot­ro­py Probe. The de­vice takes mea­sure­ments of a sub­tle glow of radia­t­ion per­vad­ing the uni­verse, the cos­mic mi­cro­wave back­ground. It’s be­lieved to be left­o­ver light from the Big Bang, a sort of ex­plo­sion that gave birth to our uni­verse.

Hot, ra­di­at­ing gas in a gal­axy clus­ter scat­ters this back­ground light, as­tro­no­mers say. The scat­ter­ing can be meas­ured to de­tect each clus­ter’s in­di­vid­ual mo­tion, al­though the sig­nal is very weak, mak­ing the meas­ure­ment hard to dis­en­tan­gle from oth­er ef­fects.


source: http://www.world-science.net/othernews/080923_wmap