RIVER OF GALAXIES CONFOUNDS THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE

August 5, 1996
Source: The Electronic Telegraph
By Adrian Berry, Science Correspondent

THERE IS a river in the sky. But its dimensions are unlike those of any on Earth. Light takes a thousand million years to cross from one of its banks to the other.

It consists of clusters of galaxies rushing through empty space at 400 miles per second. And it is throwing all ideas about a uniformly expanding universe into confusion." A film of the history of the universe run at high speed, at billions of years per day, would show a huge brilliant column of it sweeping past us," said one of the river's discoverers, Dr Marc Postman, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

"Nobody knows what is causing the galaxies to move in the fast stream. A strong possibility is that it is being attracted by a single, compact massive object with the mass of perhaps 100,000 galaxies."

This is the second known "river" of galaxies. But the first, found in 1986, had only a fifth of this one's width and a third of its speed. Like the new and bigger one, it is believed to be rushing towards a "Great Attractor", a comparatively stationary super-massive object.

The latest issue of the journal Astronomy says the Big Bang that made the universe some 15,000 million years ago may have created a "lop-sided" cosmos by spewing out more matter and energy in one direction than another. It is already known that one side of the universe, in the direction of the constellation of Leo, appears to be hotter than others.

While the universe as a whole is undoubtedly expanding, Dr Postman and his colleague Dt Tod Lauer, of the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, have looked in vain among ever more distant clusters of galaxies for "convergence", the far off point at which ALL motion can be solely attributed to the expansion. These results have sent shockwaves through the world of cosmology. The journal quoted one unnamed scientist as saying: "If they are true, then we know less than nothing."

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