Evidence Builds: Deadly Gravity Wave Approaching Earth
By Terrence Aym (Reporter) - 13 October 2011 04:45


Gigantic gravitational waves up to 100 billion light years long could be warping the universe into a twisted maze compressing and squeezing out the edges of space-time like an old rag being wrung dry. Now evidence is mounting that one of these rogue waves may be on its way towards Earth...

100 billion light year long gravity waves pushing and twisting the universe outward? That's the astounding theory being proposed by some astrophysicists to explain why space is inflating at different rates in different regions.





Immense gravity waves may be warping everything

Universe anomalies puzzled scientists for years

The scientists' hypothesis may have arrived like an interstellar cavalry for harried cosmologists. The theory of almost everything has been slipping towards almost nothing.

How?

Careful measurements of the universe's expansion (called inflation) have revealed alarming anomalies. Not every region of space is expanding at the same rate.

Why is that important?

Well, it's raising concerns because if the universe is inflating irregularly that could mean all the laws governing basic physics may be flawed…or downright wrong.

And if those laws are wrong, much of science is wrong, including the distance to other stars, the laws that affect many experiments—even the age of the universe.

Is dark energy the answer?

Scrabbling to account for the anomalous expansion, astrophysicists hypothesized a gigantic field of dark energy that is much larger than all the visible energy in the space-time continuum. Although the theory is convoluted—and has math that is analguous to forcing a square peg into a round hole—the hypothesis works and does account for the anomalies.

The hypothesis would probably be fine—except for the inconvenient fact that no one has yet been able to prove that such a thing as dark energy really exists at all.

If dark energy doesn't exist, then physicists might have had to start over from scratch, returning almost to square one in their quest to understand and define what really constitutes existence and why the universe is expanding as it is.
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