Giant "Void" Found in Space

[DarkBlood]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A giant hole in the Universe is devoid of galaxies, stars and even lacks dark matter, astronomers said on Thursday.

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.

The void is in a region of sky in the constellation Eridanus, southwest of Orion.

The researchers have posted images on the Internet at www.nrao.edu/pr/2007/coldspot/graphics.shtml.

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Now that's one big hole, and not even a black hole!

[Conscript]

It's where heaven is!

[AMC]

Thats actually a really interesting theory

[Johnson]

I like my holes big.

What? Who said that?

[[ih]Demetris]

I like my holes big.

What? Who said that?

LOL not to big though hehehe

[DarkBlood]

Technically it isn't even "space." Space has dark matter, this does not.

[Ben]

Scary.

Like, in a "Mars Attacks!" kind of way.


[edit]
actually, in all seriousness, that's really interesting

[iBrightDev]

i wonder what it could really be.

[themoose]

Maybe it's a rip in the space-time continuum allowing anybody who passes through it to travel through time.

[krakjoe]

i wonder what it could really be.

There's nothing to wonder about Justin ....

It's nothing, it's not that hard to understand, like an empty cup has nothing in it, I hate that humans are so irrational, the moment they don't understand something they gotta fill it with fairy stories and total nonsense like "Maybe that's where heaven is" ...... there's probably hundreds of thousands of areas in space just like this, we survey a very small percentage of the skies .....

[themoose]

It's not "nothing" joe, an empty cup has nothing in it just like the rest of normal space - this is something different.

[AMC]

or rather - if you consider an empty cup to have nothing in it - then you discount all particles and gases. Then you look at a vacuum. Thats not got nothing in it either as dark matter exists inside it etc... (plus light passing through etc...) This is reall nothing. its not like the space in front of your face - its the meaning of the void.

[themoose]

Much more nothing than an empty cup then .