Criticisms
Astrophysicist Ned Wright posted an online response to the study arguing that its methods are flawed. The authors of the "dark flow" study released a statement in return, refuting three of Wright's five arguments and identifying the remaining two as a typo and a technicality that do not affect the measurements and their interpretation.
A more recent statistical work done by Ryan Keisler claims to rule out the possibility that the dark flow is a physical phenomenon because Kashlinsky et al. do not consider the primary anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) as important as they are.
NASA's Goddard Space Center considered that this could be the effect of a sibling universe or a region of space-time fundamentally different from the observable universe. Data on more than 1,000 galaxy clusters have been measured, including some as distant as 3 billion light-years. Alexander Kashlinsky claims these measurements show the universe's steady flow is clearly not a statistical fluke. Kashlinsky said: "At this point we don't have enough information to see what it is, or to constrain it. We can only say with certainty that somewhere very far away the world is very different than what we see locally. Whether it's 'another universe' or a different fabric of space-time we don't know."
No evidence for dark flow was found in the new accurate cosmic microwave background radiation data by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite.
Read more about this topic: Dark Flow
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