(Editor's Note: Guest Blogger! "SHUT UP CECI!")Sometimes I get nauseous when I think about anything bigger than a house. My biggest fears consist of, but are not limited to: the Marianas Trench, Jupiter, and Colossal Squid, simply because their sheer size is so overwhelming I think these things will eat me.
So, along the line of being eaten by massive(ly awesome) things, I must be the bearer of bad news. The hugest, most awesome thing in existence might not be located in our universe. Good for my piece of mind, bad for anyone who gets off on potentially being swallowed alive by things like the Marianas Trench, Jupiter, and Colossal Squid (ew).
To understand what just went down at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, we must start at the beginning.
OF TIME.
Scientists "know" the age of our universe to be 13.7 billion years old, so the farthest light could ever get from us is 13.7 billion light years away. This is called the "observable universe." We don't really know how big our universe is, we just can't see further than the age of it. To this cosmic big bang soup we add a little theory called inflation. Among many things, it includes the idea of a BUBBLEVERSE, or multiverse. For the sake of making this whole thing less scary, I'll stick with bubbleverse. This theory posits that there are multiple universes beyond the horizon of our own. After the Big Bang, there were these huge fluctuations in energy that caused rapid expansions in space-time (whatever the fuck that means), creating "bubble universes." This theory is totally LEGIT--Brian Greene says so.
To make a long story short, there are a fuckton of galaxy clusters being sucked out of our observable universe. Meaning, OUT OF OUR BUBBLE. According to space.com:
Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can't be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon "dark flow."
This movement is not the same movement causing our universe to expand--and its speed doesn't decrease over time. WTF. Plus, it's being sucked out to a specific spot--between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela (or that pink spot of death in the map of the cosmic microwave background above). And nothing in our universe has the gravitational strength to cause it. So whatever is causing the flow must be located outside the observable universe. Basically, there is a river of star stuff being STOLEN FROM US. By what, you ask? Again, space.com:It could include giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe. These structures are what researchers suspect are tugging on the galaxy clusters, causing the dark flow.
GIANT!
MASSIVE!
STRUCTURES!Eating OUR galaxies!
My friends, your childhood nightmares have returned. Unicron is REAL.
Thankfully, she was not looking for their cousins from the sea floor, GIANT ISOPODS!
These suckers mature to a size of between 19 and 37 cm and can weigh up to three pounds. Really, other than that, I don't have words. Oh, except for this: "In Northern Taiwan and other areas, they are not uncommon at seaside restaurants, served boiled and bisected with a clean lateral slice."
"EAT ME!"