Astronomical Society.
NASA's Kashlinsky said of the new finding: "At face value, yes, there is a contradiction between what we are measuring and what they are measuring."
"Not globally, but in some important details, like the amplitude of the motion."
In fact, Kashlinsky's dark flow extends farther, is moving about four times faster, and runs in a different direction than the flow detected by Turnbull's team.
As things stand now, both teams doubt the two results can be reconciled.
But the scientists admit that they each have error bars in their results, which could possibly bring the data sets closer to agreement as the respective catalogs of supernovae and galaxy clusters grow and the measurements are refined.
More likely, though, one version of dark flow will emerge as the winner of this universal tug-of-war.
"Within a year or two, we hope to lock up this story one way or another," said Kashlinsky, who added that Turnbull's study is precisely the sort of science needed to test the dark flow theory.
There is one possibility that could allow both results to survive, Turnbull added.
"Consider a boat—a really big boat," he said. Kashlinsky had measured the motion of the boat—the collective bulk of galaxy clusters—which he found to be speeding across the ocean.
Meanwhile, Turnbull said, with the supernovae data, "I'm measuring the motion of a person. Now that person is on the boat, [and] the boat is moving, but ... that's going to give us some additional motion inside the boat."
If the person Turnbull measured is moving—i.e., not sitting down but running—inside the boat, then both motions could be happening simultaneously, and "the two results could be reconcilable," he said.
"It is unlikely, but it could be done."
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