The Solar System Is Moving Much, Much Faster Than Physics Can Explain

A new study with the incredibly exciting title of “Overdispersed Radio Source Counts and Excess Radio Dipole Detection” has announced quite a thrilling discovery, indeed: Our solar system is moving about three times faster than previously predicted. If confirmed, this fundamental fact has major implications for all of cosmology.

Now, to be clear, we’re talking about the movement of the entire solar system, taken as one unit, through the Milky Way. As the Sun and its planets orbit the center of the galaxy, we carve out a path that scientists have previously calculated should take a little less than a quarter of a billion years.

But this new evidence could adjust this timeframe by a factor of three.

Credit: NASA

Given that we’re talking about the movement of the entire reference frame from which we view the universe, it might seem like this should have been an easy measurement to make. Still, the orbit in question is so slow and involves so many bodies that it’s extremely difficult to quantify. The teams’ findings required them to compare radio telescope readings from the European LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) and others, looking for an “anisotropy” in the data.

Put simply, there should be an effect in which more radio galaxies appear in the direction of travel, by a magnitude that is strictly known. This means that the level of anisotropy in their observations should tell them the direction and speed of travel, and while the direction worked out as expected, the speed was far off.

This all has implications for the distribution of mass in the universe, in particular for the so-called “cosmological principle.” This rather grandly-named principle states that, if taken on a large enough scale, the universe is homogenous, or basically the same everywhere. These findings seem to defy this idea, and so the most fundamental assumptions of astronomy.

The data confirm prior radio-astronomy findings in quasars, which were previously attributed to faulty equipment calibration.

Professor Dominik J. Schwarz, cosmologist at Bielefeld University and co-author of the study, said in a statement that “If our solar system is indeed moving this fast, we need to question fundamental assumptions about the large-scale structure of the universe. Alternatively, the distribution of radio galaxies itself may be less uniform than we have believed. In either case, our current models are being put to the test.”