-[ Quoting Richard Meic , to Dennis Menard ]-
 DM> Latest observations indicate expansion of the universe is
 DM> `accelerating!' It is easy enough to check out; all major news
 DM> sources carried the story.
 RM> I realize that.  But at the same time observations indicate that a
 RM> huge portion of the universe is heading off in an unexpected direction,
 RM> throwing universal expansion theory out of wack.
I'm surprised you're still hanging on to this, as well, but ...
On July 27, 1997 ... (in response to the same argument, I wrote):
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If so, first let me point you to ... (unless you've already been, of course)
http://gso.lanl.gov/~heron/Dressler/dressler_s0.html
and add ...
According to Alan Dressler's, "Voyage to the Great Attractor," the
astronomical community has not universally embraced this feature.  Alan,
together with the other members of the so-called "Seven Samuri" measured the
velocities of local galaxies and concluded in the early 1980's that there
was some clustering of matter about 150 million light years towards the
Hydra-Centaurus super cluster, containing tens of thousands of galaxies
worth of mass.  Infrared astronomer Michael Rowan-Robinson used the galaxy
data from the IRAS satellite to conclude that the "peculiar motions" of the
local galaxies could be explained just by the motions of the visible
galaxies alone.  Dressler argued that this is exactly what the Seven Samurai
had been saying, and that they were not proposing some new, mysterious,
invisible concentration of matter in a specific object.  Existing
superclusters in that direction would do just as well.  So there are hard
feelings between the two groups, and the net result is that the Great
Attractor remains somewhat controversial, although Dressler says that the
controversy was artifically produced by astronomers not listening to each
other, and rushing to Press with incorrect conclusions.
Dressler notes that no one has detected signs of infalling galaxies BEHIND
the Great Attractor - which is a problem; but, this infall may be counter-
acted by the mass of the more distant "Shapley System" whose galaxies may be
tugging the Great Attractor galaxies the other way out of the center of the
Great Attractor.
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On August 11, 1997 ... you replied:
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Point taken.
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At any rate, talk to you again nearer summer when I'm back in town for a
longer and more stable period.
--
... Yet Another Endangered Species: literate consumers.
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