Going With the Flow?

[Louise Riofrio]

According to Space.com, astronomers have discovered a mysterious Dark Flow. Giant clusters of galaxies appear to be moving at high speed toward a mysterious source of gravity. No known gravitational source can account for this massive flow. We have long known of a hidden "Great Attractor" pulling galaxies toward it. The mass causing this Dark Flow must be even more enormous.

In this picture from the Cosmic Microwave Background, white spots are moving clusters of galaxies. They are all being drawn toward the small region marked in violet. Since there is no visible source of mass, scientists are speculating that the mass is outside the visible Universe! They should consider this: perhaps the source of attraction is truly dark, an ultra-massive Hole in Space.

This was predicted back in October 2006, Stirring Things Up.

"Expansion of the Universe is not uniform. Individual motions of galaxies can oppose the Hubble flow, like trout swimming upstream. The Milky Way and thousands of other galaxies are falling at 600 km/sec toward an unseen mass called the Great Attractor. This object has the mass of 10^16 Suns or 100,000 galaxies! It may be a true Black Hole, so monstrously massive that nothing can escape. There is evidence of another Great Attractor some 700 million years away.

"These monsters could be common, yet they are not counted in mass surveys. The missing 2/3 ascribed to "dark energy" may be hidden from us. It is foolish to think that humans know all that is out there. That is like Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius not realising that he is falling into an abyss.

"A physicist can go with the flow, avoid risk, and not stand out. One can profess that the Universe is dominated by "dark energy" and the Sun circles the Earth. Such people end up complaining about their unsatisfying lives because they never make a difference. It is much more fun to stir things up!

Models can predict the 71.62% proportion of this dark mass. This is precisely the amount found by the WMAP spacecraft. Because the early speed of light was much larger, primordial Black Holes formed to immense size. These ultra-massive Holes cleared immense dark voids in Space. Today they would invisibly attract galaxies toward them, exactly as has been observed. This is one more indicator of a changing speed of light.

[Darren Oliveiro-Priestnall]

Since the universe is uneven it has been proposed that this is evidence of matter in a universe beyond the visible universe acting as an attractor and causing the flow of matter in areas towards this unseen mass. New Scientist ran a great article on the subject maybe 6 months back.

It's a good blog post, it captures the most popular ideas around this new observation.
It's also good to draw attention to varying speed of light cosmologies, a subject that doesn't get as much credit as it should.