The team at the University of Minnesota said the void is nearly a billion light-years across and they have no idea why it is there.
“Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size,” said astronomy professor Lawrence Rudnick.
Writing in the Astrophysical Journal, Rudnick and colleagues Shea Brown and Liliya Williams said they were examining a cold spot using the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe satellite, and found the giant hole.
“We already knew there was something different about this spot in the sky,” Rudnick said. The region stood out as being colder in a survey of the Cosmic Microwave Background — the faint radio buzz left over from the Big Bang that gave birth to the Universe.
“What we’ve found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the Universe,” Williams said in a statement.
The astronomers said the region even appeared to lack dark matter, which cannot be seen directly but is usually detected by measuring gravitational forces.
Oh, who am I kidding? He’s probably still on the couch.
2 Comments
Wow….it doesn’t even have traces of dark matter….that’s a little unsettling.
That’s just weird, a big bunch of nothing. Perhaps it’s a doorway to another universe, and that’s where all the stuff went?
I bet The Sentry would start heading that way as soon as he heard the word “void”. That seems to be something guaranteed to get him going, and it’s a perfect excuse for him to duck out of World War Hulk, since I don’t he really wants to beat up his friend just to save the jackasses that shot said friend into space in the first place.