

NASA perplexed by galaxies heading in a particular direction - anigbrowl
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/releases/2010/10-023.html

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ugh
From the PR: “This is not something we set out to find, but we cannot make it
go away […]”

One can only imagine the drama if somone were to find such a sentence in a
climate related PR :)

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TNO
Creationists are already formulating their replies...

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NathanKP
I am always amazed by the amount of new discoveries that are still possible in
science. We might think that we have an adequate picture of our universe and
how it operates, but then we discover yet another subatomic particle or
another strange fact about the movement and organization of the galaxies.

For all we know the smallest subatomic particles yet discovered may be made up
of yet smaller subatomic particles, and the laws of physics that we use today
will be completely invalidated by a future better understanding of dark matter
and its effect on our universe.

It is humbling and incredible to think about how much there is yet to
discover.

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jballanc
You don't even have to go as far as dark matter, dark energy, or indeed space
at all to find amazing undiscovered principles in physics. For example: put a
ball on your desk. Now push it. Did it resist? Why? Well, sure, there's a
component of friction, but even without friction it would resist your
push...so, why? Inertia, right? But where does inertia come from?!?
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertia#Source_of_Inertia>

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rayboyd
The BBC covered this phenomenon in a hour long program on Tuesday. For any one
who can get it or is interested, link below.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00rgg31/Horizon_200920...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00rgg31/Horizon_20092010_Is_Everything_We_Know_About_The_Universe_Wrong/)

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ableal
Discounting the sensational title, the click-to-show-text Programme
Information has a simple summary:

 _There's something very odd going on in space - something that shouldn't be
possible. It is as though vast swathes of the universe are being hoovered up
by a vast and unseen celestial vacuum cleaner._

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waterlesscloud
We barely know anything about cosmology at all, when you get down to it.

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javert
Why do you say that?

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waterlesscloud
Because there are so often things we discover we're fundamentally wrong about.
It's really a pretty thin science based on a _lot_ of assumptions and
inferences.

It's very safe to say most of what we know about cosmology is wrong, and a
large portion of it is probably deeply wrong.

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weichi
Seriously, what are you talking about?

We know a lot about cosmology. In particular there is very good evidence for
for the basic model: hot big bang, cold dark matter, accelerating expansion,
geometrically flat, ~14 billions years old (see
<http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html> for more).

Granted we don't know what the dark matter is, and we don't know what's
causing the acceleration. Those are big unknowns! But the basic picture is
pretty well understood. And I think it's very unlikely that much of this
picture is "deeply wrong".

I mean, what do you think? Some day we are going to discover that the universe
wasn't really denser and hotter in the past? That the universe isn't really
expanding? That baryonic matter makes up all of the mass of the universe?

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waterlesscloud
The very faq you link to uses cautious language. Look at "currently most
accepted model" right there in the first question.

If you've followed cosmological history at all, it's been a cascading series
of big changes decade after decade.

I'm virtually certain the model of 2030 will vary in deep, significant ways
from the model of 2010.

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weichi
Can you be more specific? What parts of the "hot big bang, cold dark matter,
accelerating expansion, geometrically flat, ~14 billion years old" model will
be shown to be "deeply wrong"? Do you think that discovering, say, the nature
of dark energy, is going to demonstrate that the universe isn't really
expanding? That we are going to discover that the universe is really 100
billion years old? That the universe was actually colder and larger in the
past?

