By IRENE KLOTZ - DISCOVERY NEWS
Added: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:00:00 UTC

Thanks to AtheistRamblings for the link.
Original link
Articles on Dark Flow were also posted in 2008, here and here.

THE GIST:

* Our universe is sliding steadily in a specific direction, in what researchers are calling "the dark flow."
* Some suspect the flow is caused by the pull of gravity from another universe.
* One way to detect the flow is seeing how galaxy clusters scatter radiation left over from the Big Bang.

The universe is not only expanding -- it's being swept along in the direction of constellations Centaurus and Hydra at a steady clip of one million miles per hour, pulled, perhaps, by the gravity of another universe.

Scientists have no idea what's tugging at the known world, except to say that whatever it is likely dates back to the fraction of the second between the universe's explosive birth 13.7 billion years ago and its inflation a split second later.

"At this point we don't have enough information to see what it is, or to constrain it. We can only say with certainty that somewhere very far away the world is very different than what we see locally. Whether it's 'another universe' or a different fabric of space-time we don't know," Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told Discovery News.

Kashlinsky and colleagues have spent years building up evidence for what they call "the dark flow." They look at how the relic radiation from the Big Bang explosion scatters as it passes through gases in galaxy clusters, a process that is something akin to looking at stars through the bubble of Earth's atmosphere.
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TAGGED: SPACE