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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