Hyperclusters of the Universe Hint that Something is Behaving Strangely

[n2doc]

The large-scale structure of the Universe appears to be dominated by vast "hyperclusters" of galaxies, according to the new the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, compiled with a telescope at Apache Point, New Mexico. The survey plots the 2D positions of galaxies across a quarter of the sky. The science team has concluded that it could mean that gravity or dark energy – or something completely unknown – is behaving very strangely.

We know that the universe was smooth just after its birth. Measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), the light emitted 370,000 light years after the big bang, reveal only very slight variations in density from place to place. Gravity then took hold and amplified these variations into today's galaxies and galaxy clusters, which in turn are arranged into big strings and knots called superclusters, with relatively empty voids in between.

On even larger scales, though, cosmological models say that the expansion of the universe should trump the clumping effect of gravity. That means there should be very little structure on scales larger than a few hundred million light years across.

"Should be." But according to Shaun Thomas of University College London (UCL), and colleagues aggregations of galaxies stretching for more than 3 billion light years have been found. The hyperclusters are not very sharply defined, with only a couple of per cent variation in density from place to place, but even that density contrast is twice what the tandard cosmological models theory predict.

more

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/10/hyperclusters-of-the-universe-hint-that-something-in-behaving-strangely.html#more

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. Seems someone has been playing with the light switches.... recommend. n/t

[jowsybart]

2. infinite, steady state universe?

maybe the big bang was only a local disturbance in an infinite, immortal, timeless universe?

[DetlefK]

5. You mean, our universe was shed off of a larger universe?

If our universe were a Linde bubble, created when a part of the mother-universe dropped from its false vaccum-state...

Theoretical particle physics is not really my field of expertise, but I think, in that case the expansion right after the Big Bang only would have happened with speed of light, not faster-than-light.

[Peace Patriot]

3. Ha! Flummoxed again by the strangeness of the Universe...

...and by our ant-like perspective on it!

I love it! And I love how modern science seems to be learning to detach itself from fixed notions--such as (only a few decades ago) conditions on earth are so uniquely suited to the development of life that life must be very rare elsewhere in the solar system and the Universe. Now they're finding water all over the place--even on the Moon!--and hundreds of planets outside of our solar system, some of them earth-like. They have also discovered "extremophiles"--organisms living on earth in extreme conditions of cold, heat and darkness. Who knows what "life" requires?

And that's just on the matter of the development of life, something we know something about (or thought we did). When it comes to the vast, vast, VAST--so vast that it truly beggars description--Universe, of which we can see only the end points of light, which has traveled billions of light years through we know not what conditions and mediums, and from which we have so far espied numerous strange objects and events and anomalies (most of them billions of years in the past), some of which simply don't fit known physical laws. It is truly a case of, the more we learn, the more we don't know--that is, the more we learn, the more vast areas of inquiry open up, concerning which scientists are often staggered by the strangeness of what they are seeing, measuring and perceiving.

The rotation of galaxies not adhering to the laws of physics was/is one of these puzzlements. (Thumbnail: The outer areas of galaxies should rotate slower than the inner areas. They don't.) Here is the Wiki description of the problem.

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History and description of the problem

In 1959, Louise Volders demonstrated that spiral galaxy M33 does not spin as expected according to Keplerian dynamics,<2> a result which was extended to many other spiral galaxies during the seventies.<3> Based on this model, matter (such as stars and gas) in the disk portion of a spiral should orbit the center of the galaxy similar to the way in which planets in the solar system orbit the sun, that is, according to Newtonian mechanics. Based on this, it would be expected that the average orbital speed of an object at a specified distance away from the majority of the mass distribution would decrease inversely with the square root of the radius of the orbit (the dashed line in Fig. 1). At the time of the discovery of the discrepancy, it was thought that most of the mass of the galaxy had to be in the galactic bulge, near the center. The rotation direction is based on how the galaxy was formed.

Observations of the rotation curve of spirals, however, do not bear this out. Rather, the curves do not decrease in the expected inverse square root relationship but are "flat" – outside of the central bulge the speed is nearly a constant (the solid line Fig. 1). The explanation that requires the least adjustment to the physical laws of the universe is that there is a substantial amount of matter far from the center of the galaxy that is not emitting light in the mass-to-light ratio of the central bulge. This extra mass is proposed by astronomers to be due to dark matter within the galactic halo, the existence of which was first posited by Fritz Zwicky some 40 years earlier in his studies of the masses of galaxy clusters. Presently, there are a large number of pieces of observational evidence that point to the presence of cold dark matter, and its existence is a major feature of the present Lambda-CDM model that describes the cosmology of the universe.
Further investigations

Having been important in convincing people of the existence of dark matter, recent work on galaxy rotation curves provides some of its greatest challenges. Detailed investigations of the rotation curves of low surface brightness galaxies (LSB galaxies) in the 1990s<4> and of their position on the Tully-Fisher relation<5> showed that these did not behave as expected. These galaxies had to be dominated by dark matter in a surprising fashion. However, such dark matter-dominated dwarf galaxies may hold the key to solving the dwarf galaxy problem of structure formation.

Further challenges to dark matter theory, or at least its most popular form - cold dark matter (CDM), came from analysis of the centres of low surface brightness galaxies. Numerical simulations based on CDM gave predictions of the shape of the rotation curves in the centre of dark-matter dominated systems, such as these galaxies. Observations of the actual rotation curves did not show the predicted shape.<6> This so-called cuspy halo problem of cold dark matter is considered an intractable issue by theoretical cosmologists.
That dark matter theory continues to be supported as an explanation for galaxy rotation curves is because the evidence for dark matter is not solely derived from these curves. It has been uniquely successful in simulating the formation of the large scale structure seen in the distribution of galaxies and in explaining the dynamics of groups and clusters of galaxies (as originally proposed by Zwicky). Dark matter also correctly predicts the results of gravitational lensing observations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_rotation_curve
(See this page for the several links in this article.)

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"Dark matter" within the galaxies has been posited as the explanation but Wiki goes on to describe challenges to this theory. In short, scientists don't yet know why galaxies spin as they do. The spiral galaxies studied for this problem are among the most common large objects in the Universe. We don't yet have an explanation for how the most common objects in the Universe are behaving! (--or rather, were behaving billions of years ago.)

And when you get into the physics of the very small--the behavior of electrons, etc.--the puzzlements and anomalies, and outright flabbergasting events, multiply many-fold.

Current scientists know a hell of a lot more than Newton did, and even than Einstein did. But here we are, baffled by very basic problems that arise because scientists know more--can see farther and deeper into matter, have much better instruments and benefit from the collective efforts of past and current scientists more swiftly than ever before possible. The bafflements abound. The answers become ever more tenuous. In physics and cosmology (and in some other sciences as well, such as DNA research), it sure feels--to this "civilian" observer-- like something BIG is about to happen. It feels like historical moments (that we can only read about) when the accumulation of effort, puzzlements and the passion to know converge and GERMS are discovered or ELECTRICITY or RELATIVITY, or "the New World" (spherical planet), or, way, way back, FIRE. I still don't really understand the lack of a unified physical theory but I know that it bothers many physicists to distraction. Our theories of how everything works do not add up and do not fit together. Irritating puzzlements like this are the stuff of major breakthroughs.

This anomaly--"vast 'hyperclusters' of galaxies" where smoothness should (according to theory) prevail--is just ONE MORE such bafflement added to the ferment of unanswered questions and failures of things to fit together that so resembles, say, the period just before Copernicus challenged Ptolemy on the sun circling the earth (rather than the other way around). (It's kind of amusing that Einstein came along and made that HUGE controversy--the one that got Galileo banned by the Catholic Church--"relative.") (But we are all still Ptolemaians, really, until we drop the words "sunrise" and "sunset" from our languages.) (What could replace them? How about Lorsunri and Lorsunse--"locally relative sunrise," "locally relatiive sunset"? or, Lorup and Lordown?)

What will it be? Graviton beams into the past (time travel)? A realization that we don't exist, really (i.e., we happened long ago)? The Universe is about to blink out of existence (--there is nothing "behind" those beams of light; they are the last signals of a Universe that has long vanished over some impassable "horizon")? The black holes in every galaxy are flipping inside out, to reveal a world in which George Bush Jr. never existed? (Har!) Faster-than-light travel and unlimited energy? Faster-than-light travel and unlimited energy BUT the discovery that humans turn into their constituent chemicals after a certain number of faster-than-light trips "out there"? Einstein was wrong--it's not all "relative," it's all (fill in the blank)? ("Repeating" is my favorite Buddhist-borrowed notion.) (It's all repeating!) (We are repeating; everything is repeating; and these repeating tapes will soon be twining into each other and then somebody will put them on a microchip and we can watch all the repeats, including ourselves re-living everything, over and over, with just tiny differences between parallel, repeating multi-verses.) (??)

Do you all have this feeling? We can't just go on knowing so much more and knowing so little of what we can guess that it is possible to know? Are we going to survive this era and become wizened old/young "gods" traveling in marvelous, life-sustaining bubbles to other worlds and to the edges of vast distant "horizons" beyond which points "there be dragons"?

I can get excited about all this, obviously. I'd sure like to know what's coming.

[mindwalker_i]

4. Just imagine what it would be like

to be sitting on a recliner in the middle of one of the gaps between hyperclusters. You probably need a bungie to hold you down and a tank of air. But everything you could see (if it wasn't too dim) would be a fuck of a long walk away.

That would mess with your head.

[truedelphi]

6. K & R for later viewing. n/t