samtsai.com

Holy! This is not the ordinary massive black hole. A giant hole filled with absolutely nothing is detected in the universe. This empty space is one billion light year wide. Not even the dark matter—mysterious stuff we can’t see that still has mass—can be detected in that “black” hole. No light, no star, no planet, no dust, no mass, nothing at all.

More info on this Big Empty Hole of Nothing in the universe.

A giant hole in the Universe is devoid of galaxies, stars and even lacks dark matter.

Astronomers think they have found the biggest empty hole ever, a region of the universe a billion light-years wide where everything — stars, dust, even dark matter — is simply missing.

So big, and so empty?

It’s a discovery that lends itself to jokes about your favourite suburb, but Lawrence Rudnick, a University of Minnesota astronomy professor, is serious.

If someone crossed this area in a spacecraft, “travelling at the speed of light it would take about a billion years and there wouldn’t be much to see. A pretty boring journey,” he says.

Astronomers have known for years there are empty places in the universe, but they never expected one so big.

In our own neighbourhood, there would be hundreds of galaxies in a region this size, each of them holding a few hundred billion stars, as well as immense clouds of dust and gas.

There would also be dark matter — mysterious stuff we can’t see that still has mass, and exerts a gravitational pull on objects near it.

Signals would be zooming all over the place — x-rays, visible light, ultraviolet, infrared, all sorts of radio waves.

But when the Minnesota team looked for radio signals coming from this area south of the constellation Orion, there was just a lot of missing signal. As well, there’s a spot where the “background” of microwaves from the very early universe is unusually cold, another indication that matter is missing.

He can’t say the region is absolutely empty. Matter in this void may be like water in a desert: It’s there, but very, very scarce.

But why is the empty space there — or not there, if you look at it that way?

Through gravity, the astronomer says.

In the very young universe, matter was distributed very evenly all over, he says. “If the universe had stayed that way we wouldn’t be here because you wouldn’t have stars (or) galaxies if you didn’t have clumping of material.

“Gravity makes things clump. But what that means is, it leaves holes behind.”

This just happens to be a much bigger hole that anyone expected.

“Our view would be that this is accidental. There’s nothing really special happening in that region.”

Read more: canada.com

Bookmark to: