home • about • essential guide • picture of the day • thunderblogs • news • multimedia • predictions • products • get involved • contact

picture of the day             archive             subject index          


 Computer simulation showing concentrated points of energy "texture" in the Virgo Cluster deep field.

 

Oct 03, 2008
Greater and Greater Attractors

Galaxy clusters are being pulled by a force emanating from "beyond the horizon" of the universe. Could electrified plasma be the culprit?

An analysis of data provided by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) appears to indicate an unknown gravitational mass lying over the cosmic event horizon. Far past any current instrument's detection ability is something with a force exceeding the combined mass of whole superclusters, inexorably drawing them out into the darkness.

Said Alexander Kashlinsky from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center: "The distribution of matter in the observed universe cannot account for this motion."

According to astronomers, the universe itself is expanding at an ever accelerating rate. Estimates for the rate of expansion vary, but contemporary theories suggest that galaxies are receding from us because they started out receding from us due to an inflationary event imparted by the Big Bang. Current estimates put the figure at approximately 71 kilometers per second for every 3.3 million light-years. This supposed dilation of space/time is called the Hubble flow, or the Hubble constant.

In the 1960s however, detailed redshift calculations of the galaxies near the Milky Way seemed to show a large-scale motion superposed on the Hubble flow. The Local Group, the Virgo supercluster, the Hydra-Centaurus supercluster, and other galactic superclusters are moving at 600 kilometers per second toward the constellation Centaurus. Scientists describe the motion as "a great river of galaxies" that is flowing into the gravity well of some gigantic gravitational source over 216 million light-years away. The massive structure is known as the Great Attractor.

The Great Attractor is thought to be composed of dark matter because it cannot be seen with any telescope. Astronomical observations uncovered a galaxy cluster known as Abell 3627 in the general vicinity, but found ten times too little visible matter for the effect. It is interesting that astrophysical studies demonstrate unexpected movement whenever new instruments with improved vision are implemented.

Almost from the start of modern astronomy it was found that the Andromeda galaxy is hurtling toward the Milky Way at over 320,000 kilometers per hour. Consensus opinion states that only gravity can exert the force necessary for Andromeda's speed, although there appears to be insufficient luminous matter between the two galaxies to account for it. A mass of ten Milky Way galaxies would be required to accelerate Andromeda, scientists postulate, but it remains unseen to this day.

As time progressed, better telescopes and computers were constructed. Lo and behold redshift measurements of galaxies in the Local Group showed them flying toward the center of the Virgo cluster at nearly two million kilometers per hour. The Virgo cluster is 50 million light years from Earth and contains two giant elliptical galaxies, M84 and M86, but whatever is tugging on that incredible mass remains invisible.

In order to explain all these combined redshifts, a group of objects called the Great Wall (or the Centaurus Wall) in which the Great Attractor is embedded was theorized to be the motivating factor. However, the Great Wall does not possess enough mass density to influence structures like superclusters. These various surveys (along with other data) led to the theory of dark matter.

Now another force, only this time orders of magnitude more powerful than the Great Wall and its Great Attractor scion, is thought to exist so far away from Earth that it is outside the range of our most powerful telescopes. In keeping with the terminology that has become familiar to astronomers the unseen power has been dubbed "dark flow."

Alexander Kashlinsky: "The clusters show a small but measurable velocity that is independent of the universe's expansion and does not change as distances increase. We never expected to find anything like this."

How many times are reports from respected scientists, operating complex devices designed to test their theories, going to begin or end with the words, "we never expected this?" Notwithstanding the problems associated with redshift, previous Picture of the Day articles about WMAP, galaxy clusters, and gravity-only cosmology have elucidated a force extant in the universe exerting an attractive power 46 orders of magnitude greater than gravity: electricity. Each "puzzling" discovery by research scientists reinforces the tenets of plasma cosmology and serves to differentiate it from the imprecise predictions of consensus models.

As astronomer and Electric Universe theorist Mel Acheson wrote: "Clusters of galaxies are pinches in a supergalactic Birkeland current. The usual morphology of a Birkeland current is a double helix, or a hierarchy of double helices. With greater resolution, each filament of a current is, at a smaller scale, a tube of filaments which, in pairs, tend to spiral around a common axis."

Forces exerted by electrified plasma contained in the twisting filaments of Birkeland currents dominate the universe. They circulate in a cosmic circuit that flows into our field of view and then out into the void with long-range attraction between them. Therefore, the most probable "Great Attractors" are those filaments of electrified plasma with billions-of-trillion-times more intense fields of influence than gravity.

No doubt the universe is larger than what we can observe at this moment because more sensitive tools have continued to reveal greater depths. Out of those depths rise electrical energies rivaling Zeus in his might. It is there we should look for our explanations and not to centuries-old hypotheses conceived in a time when none of today's observations were possible.

By Stephen Smith
___________________________________________________________________________

Please visit our Forum

The Electric Sky and The Electric Universe available now!

  EXECUTIVE EDITORS: David Talbott, Wallace Thornhill
     MANAGING EDITORS: Steve Smith, Mel Acheson
  CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Michael Armstrong, Dwardu Cardona,
Ev Cochrane, C.J. Ransom, Don Scott, Rens van der Sluijs, Ian Tresman
  WEBMASTER: Brian Talbott

Copyright 2008: thunderbolts.info

home  •  thunderblogs  •   forum  •  picture of the day  •   resources  •  team  •  updates  •  contact us