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93. Galaxy Clusters
Hundreds of rapidly moving galaxies often cluster tightly together. Their relative velocities, as inferred by the redshifts of their light, are so high that these clusters should be flying apart, because each cluster’s visible mass is much too small to hold its galaxies together gravitationally.a Because galaxies within clusters are so close together, they have not been flying apart for very long.
A similar statement can be made concerning many stars in spiral galaxies and gas clouds that surround some galaxies.b These stars and gas clouds have such high relative velocities that they should have broken their “gravitational bonds” long ago if they were billions of years old. If the redshift of starlight always indicates a star’s velocity, then a multi-billion-year-old universe is completely inconsistent with what is observed. If redshifts can be caused by phenomena other than a star’s velocity, much of current astronomical thinking is wrong.
These observations have led some to conclude, not that the universe is young, but that unseen, undetected mass is holding these stars and galaxies together. For this to work, the hidden mass, sometimes called dark matter, must be 10–100 times greater than all visible mass, and the hidden mass must be in the right places. However, many experiments have shown that the needed “missing mass” does not exist.c Some researchers are still searching, because the alternative is a young universe. [See “Missing Mass” on page 29.]