Don't be afraid of the dark.
Posted on 01/12/2005 8:28:54 PM PST by aculeus
One of the universe's great mysteries, how we came to exist, has been solved.
Astronomers have long wondered why the infant universe did not simply spread out evenly after the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, creating a cosmos filled with nothing more than a uniform mist of matter. Instead, matter mysteriously clumped together, forming stars, galaxies, planets - and finally us.
A team of 30 Australian and British astronomers has found the "missing link" between the early fog-like universe and the lumpy one we see today.
Using the 3.9 metre Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring, near Coonabarabran, the team produced a three-dimensional map of 220,000 nearby galaxies. The 10-year project, Two-degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey, reveals that galaxies, each populated by billions of stars, are not evenly distributed through space but cluster in subtle patterns.
"There is a definite pattern," Warrick Couch, of University of NSW, said yesterday. The "wiggles" in the maps, he said, were fossils of ripples that must have flowed through space soon after the Big Bang, destabilising the initial mist of matter.
The ripples would have formed imperfections in the otherwise uniform universe. Thanks to gravity "those imperfections grew and magnified. We are all caught up in this general collapse - matter collapsed not into just galaxies and stars but planets as well," Professor Couch said.
Joss Hawthorn, of the Anglo-Australian Observatory, said the imperfections were "like acorns that grew to make forests".
"If the universe had remained essentially a diffuse fog of matter, we wouldn't exist," he said.
Asked what caused the ripples, he said: "It may be that even nature can't be perfect."
Astronomers first noticed the ripples in 1992 in radiation left over from the Big Bang.
Professor Couch said that in the first 300,000 years of the universe, radiation and matter were coupled together. "The theorists told us there should also have been ripples in matter, but they had never been observed.
"We have really nailed it," he said, calling the find "one of the great discoveries of astronomy".
Dr Matthew Colless, who is director of the Anglo-Australian Observatory, said: "We've confirmed that gravity was the driving force that created today's galaxies."
Their mapping project measured patterns in galaxies up to a billion light years away.
They also found that ordinary matter, the stuff from which stars, planets and people are made, accounts for just 18 per cent of the mass of the universe. The remaining 82 per cent consists of the yet unidentified "dark matter".
Whew! Now that THAT's solved...what's on TV?
This isn't an explanation at all. It leaves tons of questions unanswered? For example, where did the ripples originate from? What caused them?
I just read this through--is it just me or is there absolutely nothing startlingly new in this article?
It leaves tons of questions unanswered? <=====
Bad grammer alert.
DOOOHHHHH! MMMMMMM DOOOONUTS...
Yeah ... LOL ... now let's explain what caused the "Big Bang".
Don't be afraid of the dark.
Screw "us" - it's all about ME. The entire universe exists to entertain me, or at least heap praise upon my FR posts. All freepers may commence justifying their illusionary existence by praising this post NOW...
One of the universe's great mysteries, how we came to exist, has been solved.Oh, I thought they were going to talk about where all my missing socks went off to.
"Center of the Universe" CBS. Just saw it go by on the schedule. Looks like another dumb comedy ...
Brilliant
Hey BTD, I think "this thread's for YOU!" ;)
"In the beginning, GOD created the Heavens and the Earth."
Why is it that all of these "scientists" believe in random evolution and spontaneous existence? Unreal.
Oh...I thought this was going to be the answer to why I can't get a date.
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