Question?
Here's the original NASA article:
(Scientists Detect Cosmic 'Dark Flow' Across Billions of Light Years)
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2008/dark_flow.html
Apologies to HZ'ers for missing this thread before and reposting it elsewhere. Not intentional. Anyway...
Cosmologists view the microwave background - a flash of light emitted 380,000 years after the big bang - as the universe's ultimate reference frame. Relative to it, all large-scale motion should show no preferred direction.
"The clusters show a small but measurable velocity that is independent of the universe's expansion and does not change as distances increase," says lead researcher Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We never expected to find anything like this."
The finding flies in the face of predictions from standard cosmological models, which describe such motions as decreasing at ever greater distances.
"The distribution of matter in the observed universe cannot account for this motion," he says.
What do folks make of the above statements from NASA's press release? Are they accurate? If so, what does it do for the standard model if "inflation" generally rules out or fails to predict such motions?
On a completely different note, have they now offered a novel way of observing celestial motions other than presuming a redshift = distance relation? Would this method of determining motion be able to independently verify assumed celestial object positions and/or motion (or refute them, if such is the case)? If so, it could be a useful tool for observing certain things which may be in some way or another disputed at present... Just a thought.
Regards,
~Michael Gmirkin