REM@MIT-MC@sri-unix (12/03/82)
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM at MIT-MC> In case you missed this in Tuesday's newspapers or AP wire, astronomers using radiotelescopes in Puerto Rico and West Virginia have discovered a string of galaxies 700 million lightyears long, stretching from Pegasus to Ursa Major as viewed from here. Compare this to the Virgo supercluster which is only about 50 megaparsecs (160 million lightyears) from end to end. This find leads credence to the theory that the Universe was initially mostly uniform on the large scale but then collapsed in places to form long narrow strands of material that later formed chains of galaxies, and then yet later formed lumps along these strands and at intersections of strands which developed into superclusters of galaxies; while leading away from the alternative theory that the first collapsing was into whorlpools of matter that formed clusters of galaxies. (Note that in the large context, galaxies and clusters of galaxies are pointlike, being finite in all three dimensions, whereas strands are linelike, being infinite in one dimension and finite in the other two. The Universe seems to have locally collapsed in a linelike rather than pointlike or planelike way.) Why may this be important to space travel? If the Universe consists of a web of connected strands instead of isolated superclusters, it'll be easier to reach all parts of the Universe because it'll be possible to derive energy for propulsion while travling along strands instead of having to coast with essentially zero energy input along great voids from one supercluster to another. Thus once we acquire the ability to jump between neighboring galaxies in a cluster we may suddenly be able to circumnavigate the whole Universe instead of just the Virgo Supercluster.