Science!!

Unknown Quantities

The plumes of Martian methane measure up to 19,000 metric tons - the same amount as our Earth-based methane hotspots. We know that our planet's methane is made by boatloads of microbes. "Microbes that produced methane from hydrogen and carbon dioxide were one of the earliest forms of life on Earth," says Carl Pilcher, Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute. "If life ever existed on Mars, it's reasonable to think that its metabolism might have involved making methane from Martian atmospheric carbon dioxide."

Dark Flow

Dark matter, dark energy, dark flow - the "dark" here seems to signify that, in the case of the universe, many things are unseen and unavailable for examination. Perhaps the most disconcerting of these "dark" substances is a force called dark flow. It's caused by a massive object just outside of our view of the visible universe, and it's pulling entire galaxy clusters towards it at an alarming rate.

In 2008, scientists stumbled upon dark flow while studying some of the largest structures in the cosmos: galaxy clusters. These clusters are made of thousands of individual galaxies, and the movement of each cluster can be tracked by their motion through the cosmic microwave radiation (heat left over from the Big Bang). Alexander Kashlinsky and his team found that some of the clusters were moving fast - really fast. In fact, they were traveling at nearly 2 million miles per hour towards a particular patch of sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela.

Since no known object can explain the speed at which these objects were moving or even explain the logic for them all traveling toward the same place, scientists have decided there must be something beyond the known universe that is pulling them. According to inflation theory, the observable universe is just a small portion of the total universe. There may be other parts that we just cannot see, because light has not traveled that far yet. These regions likely don't contain stars or galaxies, but instead massive superstructures larger than anything we can comprehend. These superstructures may be what's tugging on the galaxy clusters.

"The structures responsible for this motion have been pushed so far away by inflation, I would guesstimate they may be hundreds of billions of light years away," explains Kashlinsky. "Most likely to create such a coherent flow, they would have to be some very strange structures, maybe warped space-time."