What is a space anomaly?


Be careful!

Just because we can come up with a name for something doesn't mean that the thing exists.

This is a stock item in most science fiction stories such as the ones that often come up in Star Trek. The poor spaceship Enterprise always seems to run into one kind of 'anomaly' in space or another, especially in the 2003 Season episodes of 'Enterprise'.

In reality, we have no idea what kinds of things are out there in space. All we can say is that if there are any weird things such as vast cosmic strings, domain walls, textures or what have you, they are not very strong and plentiful. Looking out into space, we do not see lots and lots of 'gravitational lensing' events which cannot be explained in terms of distant galaxies being lensed by the gravitational fields from known foreground galaxies. Any anomalies in spacetime, ought to be accompanied by curvature and lensing of the light from objects behind the 'anomaly' along the line of sight to us.

We do not see anything like this.

Return to Dr. Odenwald's Gravity page at the Astronomy Cafe Blog.