A Hole lot of nothing found by astronomers.

[The Kilted Yaksman]

Taken from: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/08/24/universe.hole.ap/index.html
An excerpt:
"WASHINGTON (AP) -- Astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. That's got them scratching their heads about what's just not there.

The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That's an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday."


I don't know the policy of copying and pasting news items like this, so I only copied part of it. Hope it's not a repost.

[alfaniner]

I wonder if they will call it "The Expanse" after that one Voyager episode.

[petra10]

Wow I wonder what it is.Somebody must have some idea.
Or maybe we can make some up.

[Lucifuge Rofocale]

It's nothing :p
Wow I wonder what it is.Somebody must have some idea.
Or maybe we can make some up.

[Juustin]

I wonder if they will call it "The Expanse" after that one Voyager episode.

Someone on another message board has already unofficially named it "The Goatse of the Gods". You either get it or you don't, but googling isn't recommended if you don't.

[tracer]

I wonder if they will call it "The Expanse" after that one Voyager episode.


You misspelled "the entire 3rd season of Star Trek: Enterprise."

Hope this helps.

[ynot]

Awww! - I wanted to see a photo of "nothing" :D

[prewitt81]

Or maybe we can make some up.

Conditions at Bang + planck time included an overabundance of anti-gravitons which caused a nearly immediate re-crunch followed by another not-as-big-as-the-Big Bang.

You did mean "make some up" in the sense that we can base it on absolutely nothing, right? :boxedin:

[Fnord]

I wonder if they will call it "The Expanse" after that one Voyager episode.

That was the Nekrit Expanse, and from inside it, you could see no stars.

[tsg]

It's god's house.

[fuelair]

It's god's house.
If so, how far away is it? We owe him a visit.:mad:

[Kevin_Lowe]

I wonder how many million/billion years would it take a technologically mature species to make that kind of "hole", if they were busily englobing stars with solar panels?

[athon]

I wonder how many million/billion years would it take a technologically mature species to make that kind of "hole", if they were busily englobing stars with solar panels?

Nice idea, but that energy would have to come out (most probably as infrared) somewhere along the line, such as a planet. It would be interesting to look for such a signature of Type II civilisations, though.

I just think God ran out of funding at that point.

Athon

[CapelDodger]

I wonder how many million/billion years would it take a technologically mature species to make that kind of "hole", if they were busily englobing stars with solar panels?

Forty-two.

[EatatJoes]

The Nothing exists and is expanding because we don't believe in the impossible, because we care not to imagine and wonder. Just ask Gmork.

[Kevin_Lowe]

Nice idea, but that energy would have to come out (most probably as infrared) somewhere along the line, such as a planet. It would be interesting to look for such a signature of Type II civilisations, though.

I just think God ran out of funding at that point.

Athon

Could be. Or it could be that they're so super-duper advanced that they squeeze every last possible bit of work out of every bit of energy and only let it radiate away at the same level as the cosmic background radiation.

[athon]

Could be. Or it could be that they're so super-duper advanced that they squeeze every last possible bit of work out of every bit of energy and only let it radiate away at the same level as the cosmic background radiation.

My knowledge of physics is stretched at this point, so I might be displaying ignorance by asking if this is even possible. Is it theoretically feasible based on what we currecntly know to take all of the energy out of a star (through something like a Dyson Sphere), use the energy efficiently and radiate it all away as microwaves in a magnitude equivalent to the background radiation?

Athon

[Complexity]

Ooops.

My bad.

[Kevin_Lowe]

My knowledge of physics is stretched at this point, so I might be displaying ignorance by asking if this is even possible. Is it theoretically feasible based on what we currecntly know to take all of the energy out of a star (through something like a Dyson Sphere), use the energy efficiently and radiate it all away as microwaves in a magnitude equivalent to the background radiation?

Athon

My physics ends at first year university level and is as rusty as all get out, but I don't think the laws of thermodynamics forbid it if the radiating surface (the Dyson sphere or whatever) has a big enough surface area on the outside to shovel energy out as fast as it comes in from the star.

I'm not saying I know it's possible, even in theory, just that with my limited knowledge of physics I don't know it to be impossible.

Stimpson J. Cat would be the guy to ask, maybe he'll stick his head into the thread and help us out.

[UnrepentantSinner]

Maybe it's worse than we think (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God).

[casebro]

Actually, it is not a hole in space. That would pale into insignificance compared to:

It is a Tube Of Nothingness, and it is aimed right at us.

[INRM]

Seriously -- any actual guesses as to what it is without using paranormal explanations using actual scientific estimates?

Perhaps it will help yield an answer as to where the end of the universe is and where the beginning is?

[HghrSymmetry]

The WMAP results have confirmed the slight temperature variations and subsequent matter patterns. But why the larger void?
I'm wondering if dark energy had regions where it had slightly more influence. But then its effects are supposedly prominent on vast cosmic scales, so whether it has any baring on the early inflationary stage is speculation.

Ah,...never mind.

[Phrost]

Someone on another message board has already unofficially named it "The Goatse of the Gods". You either get it or you don't, but googling isn't recommended if you don't.

Haha. Goon?

[this charming man]

Could it be like the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico?

[GoodGuysEatPie]

Observations of large-scale structure in the Universe show that clusters of galaxies form around "voids". I often think of it like a foam of soap bubbles. The galaxies are on the edges of the "bubbles" and there is a dearth of galaxies inside them. In general, astronomers observe that this structure is uniform in size scale everywhere we look. We expect to see voids, but they are evenly distributed on the large scales, which is why this observation is special.

This "hole in the Universe" has a few possible explanations, in accordance with current astrophysics. However, it is also possible that if it doesn't turn out to fit in these explanations, the "hole" may instigate a new rethinking of some the particulars of CDM (Cold Dark Matter) Cosmology.

I've skimmed the paper by Rudnick, et al. They seem to think that the "hole" is probably not an "early Universe" phenomenon, even though it appears in the Cosmic Microwave Background. Their hypothesis is that it is more localized phenomenon, and that it could be a product of the Late Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) Effect. In lay terms, I think the best I can do is say that late ISW is a projection effect that causes things to look bigger than perhaps they were in their local region.

If it is indeed a truly large void, then it also could be a statistical fluke. Just as there are a few abnormally large "filaments" of galaxy clusters (CfA2 Great Wall, Sloan Great Wall), there are probably a few extremely large voids out there too.

It is not uncommon to make discoveries like these when pouring over sky survey data. Imagine holding up a dime at arms-length and covering up some sky. When astronomers look at sky survey images, they're often looking at pictures on the order of what you just covered up (or smaller!). Now, imagine how many dimes it would take to cover the entire sky! Looking over these images, even with computers, takes a very long time. I would not be surprised if we find more of these "holes in the Universe".

~goodguyseatpie~

[Alareth]

I wonder how many million/billion years would it take a technologically mature species to make that kind of "hole", if they were busily englobing stars with solar panels?


Mmmmmm ... Dyson SpheresWP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere)

[Darth Rotor]

In lay terms, I think the best I can do is say that late ISW is a projection effect that causes things to look bigger than perhaps they were in their local region.

Aha, I think you have it. It is a dark matter inverse mirror, since objects are larger than they appear. :)

By the way, great post. :)

DR

[GoodGuysEatPie]

Aha, I think you have it. It is a dark matter inverse mirror, since objects are larger than they appear. :)

By the way, great post. :)

DR

Thanks! :)

The Universe is indeed a kind of funhouse. This is why I love to teach astronomy (and skepticism while I'm at it). The Universe is so much neater and stranger than the woo our feeble minds invent.

~goodguyseatpie~

[skeptigirl]

Wow I wonder what it is.Somebody must have some idea.
Or maybe we can make some up.I'm waiting for the 3D model that makes sense. I can't make sense of this one in my head. (http://www.space.com/php/multimedia/imagedisplay/img_display.php?pic=070823_huge_hole_02.jpg&cap=Illustration+of+the+effect+of+matter+on+the+co smic+microwave+background+(CMB).+On+the+right,+the +CMB+is+released+shortly+after+the+Big+Bang,+with+ tiny+ripples+in+temperature+due+to+fluctuations+in +the+early+universe.+As+the+radiation+traverses+th e+universe,+it+experiences+slight+perturbations.+I n+the+direction+of+the+giant+newly-discovered+void,+the+WMAP+satellite+(top+left)+see s+a+cold+spot,+while+the+VLA+(bottom+left)+sees+fe wer+radio-emitting+galaxies.+CREDIT%3A+Bill+Saxton,+NRAO/AUI/NSF,+NASA) If the hole were in the right place, maybe it could be that edge which isn't supposed to exist. But I suppose it isn't that simple.

I would like to read this book soon, The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything
K. C. Cole. (http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/015100398X/ref=sib_dp_pt/002-6092422-3071219#reader-link) Apparently there's a whole book on the hole in the Universe.

[tkingdoll]

Thanks! :)

The Universe is indeed a kind of funhouse. This is why I love to teach astronomy (and skepticism while I'm at it). The Universe is so much neater and stranger than the woo our feeble minds invent.

~goodguyseatpie~

Oh yeah? So what's a seat pie?

:whistling

[skeptigirl]

Maybe it's worse than we think (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God).As in it's the lights starting to go out?

[GoodGuysEatPie]

I'm waiting for the 3D model that makes sense. I can't make sense of this one in my head. If the hole were in the right place, maybe it could be that edge which isn't supposed to exist. But I suppose it isn't that simple.

I would like to read this book soon, The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything
K. C. Cole. Apparently there's a whole book on the hole in the Universe.

I haven't read it, but I suspect Cole's book doesn't deal with this kind of "hole". If she talks about voids in galaxy cluster structure, then maybe so.

I'm an astronomer, and I think that image you link to (the one you can't wrap your brain around) is awful. It must have been created by a researcher who doesn't spend a lot of time teaching. One of the supreme frustrations of conveying cosmological concepts (say that ten times fast), is that they are not intuitive concepts and can not be pictured easily.

In that image, the grayscale picture is likely the radio survey from the VLA. Each white pixel would represent a galaxy (or group of galaxies). The color portions shows the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), something I like to call "early Universe light" (photon light, not a low-calorie Universe). CMB photons were all produced around the same time, ~400,000 years after the Big Bang and before any matter accumulated into stars and galaxies. Dark patches in the CMB picture show regions of either high matter density or low matter density. The small color portion on the left of the VLA picture shows a "cold" patch, a large region of low matter density. This "cold" patch evidently corresponds to the "hole" found in the VLA survey.

Without knowing the distance to the void, a 3-D representation probably won't come about. But if you were type "large-scale structure" into a Google image search, you will get plenty of 3-D models of voids (both computational and observational, some of them will even be animated). That might help with your visualization.

The notion of the Universe having "edges", and the beginning and "end" of the Universe, has been brought up a couple times in this thread, with speculations as to how they are connected to this "hole" discovery. They aren't connected at all. This void seems to be merely a region in the Universe that doesn't have galaxies. The reason for its existence will have less to do with the beginning of the Universe and more to do with what happened AFTER the Universe started. As for the "end" of the Universe, the only connecting motif is the fact that local regions such as ours will become even less dense in the future. So, yes, as distant galaxies become even more distant, the lights will wink out, in a manner of speaking.

~goodguyseatpie~

[plumjam]

It's where God lives. He likes his own space.

[skeptigirl]

I haven't read it, but I suspect Cole's book doesn't deal with this kind of "hole". ....

~goodguyseatpie~No no no...I didn't mean this author predicted the hole here. The book is about "nothing".

From the introduction:...a large obvious blindspot in our understanding of the Universe.

That missing something, strange to say, is a grasp of nothing itself...

[mummymonkey]

Move along now; nothing to see here.

[rjh01]

Maybe it is full of dark energy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy). That would have thrown out any mass.

Also the hole could have black holes in it. They are undetectable if they are not absorbing any mass.

[skeptigirl]

Maybe it is full of dark energy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy). That would have thrown out any mass.

Also the hole could have black holes in it. They are undetectable if they are not absorbing any mass.No black holes in it, those are revealed by gravity regardless of their X-ray beams.

[INRM]

It wasn't a perfect void IIRC, there was a temperature gradient in the area and such right?

[tsg]

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070826

[This Guy]

A co-worker who is somewhat into space woo (aliens/flying saucers...) asked me about this last night.

His question, after giving a brief summary of the news article he had read, was "Why isn't there something in there?"

My answer was "Why does something HAVE to be in there?"

Then I said, it's very interesting, but I'll withhold judgment till the smart folks give more details :)

I do find it very interesting. And with my totally non-contributing educational background (1 year of general science in Jr. High school), my first thought is that it's just an area that ended up empty as things spread out from the big bang. As for the Dark stuff (matter/energy), I'm too ignorant on those topics to even let them cloud my thinking ;)

I'm looking forward to learning more about this though!

Thanks for the post!

[Fnord]

The Nothing exists and is expanding because we don't believe in the impossible, because we care not to imagine and wonder. Just ask Gmork.

Tell Gmork that Fnord says "Hi!"

[mummymonkey]

If we can see objects on the other side of it then it isn't really empty, is it?

[luchog]

Eh, it's just a space being cleared for a hyperspace bypass; nothing we need to worry about.

[DanishDynamite]

Taken from: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/08/24/universe.hole.ap/index.html
An excerpt:
"WASHINGTON (AP) -- Astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. That's got them scratching their heads about what's just not there.

The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That's an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday."
My bolding. How do they know the bolded bit is true?

[GoodGuysEatPie]

I'm waiting for the 3D model that makes sense. I can't make sense of this one in my head.


Back to the confusing illustration again. One of the researchers in this discovery is a friend of mine (well, all of them actually...), so I emailed him to help clarify a couple points for me. The illustration that skeptigirl linked to above (sorry I can't do links yet) is a bit misleading. (no her fault, btw, since every news service is using it).

The large oval is not the entire sky as seen by WMAP (or other CMB telescopes). The oval is actually about 10 degrees on a side. That's still pretty big, considering that if you hold your thumb out at arm's length it covers up roughly 1 degree of sky. When I saw that illustration, I wondered if the large oval was the entire CMB sky, since no qualifiers were given.

I also asked if they knew of other "cold patches" in the CMB that are as big or bigger than the one that correlates to the VLA Survey "hole". It turns out that this is the biggest cold patch in the CMB sky. My friend also said (and he grumbled that it is not being mentioned in the media), that this effect is being seen everywhere in the sky. That is, large-scale structure voids (see my post above) are correlating to cold patches in the CMB and that this is consistent with the late integrated Sachs-Wolfe Effect. It just turns out that this "hole in the Universe" is the largest of them discovered.

My take:
The perplexing thing is not the existence of this "hole" (it's a large-scale structure void), but why is it larger than other voids. For now, until more data comes in, I'll stick with my "statistical fluke" hypothesis.

~goodguyseatpie~
(the guy who apparently can't write without using lots of parentheses)

[DanishDynamite]

The perplexing thing is not the existence of this "hole" (it's a large-scale structure void), but why is it larger than other voids. For now, until more data comes in, I'll stick with my "statistical fluke" hypothesis.
You seem to know your way around the astronomical world...any thoughts on my previous post?

[GoodGuysEatPie]

"The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That's an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday."

My bolding. How do they know the bolded bit is true?

Stars reside in galaxies. It is in galaxies that stars form, live and die. Our Milky Way Galaxy is rougly 100,000 light-years across. The sizes involved with large-scale structure voids are on the order of hundreds of millions of light-years. Stars do not form by themselves in intergalactic space, so it would be very unlikely to find any in this "hole in the Universe" void. Very rarely, a star may have a galactic orbit that causes it to eject from a galaxy, but in that case, we probably wouldn't observe it anyway.

Black holes are the corpses of very massive stars (in general, there are also theorized to be micro-black holes produced in the early Universe). To find black holes, you have to look for where the stars are...namely galaxies.

Galaxies tend to form around the Dark Matter. Dark Matter has enough mass to hold the galaxy clusters together in the knots and filaments of large-scale structure. In the voids between the filaments, there is little Dark Matter, otherwise galaxies would be attracted there.

That AP quote is just sensationalizing the discovery. Astronomers don't expect to observe stars, black holes or dark matter in voids, so the only reason to mention it in a media article in this manner is to be "poetic". The real question (see post above) is why is this void bigger than the rest.

[DanishDynamite]

Stars reside in galaxies. It is in galaxies that stars form, live and die. Our Milky Way Galaxy is rougly 100,000 light-years across. The sizes involved with large-scale structure voids are on the order of hundreds of millions of light-years. Stars do not form by themselves in intergalactic space, so it would be very unlikely to find any in this "hole in the Universe" void. Very rarely, a star may have a galactic orbit that causes it to eject from a galaxy, but in that case, we probably wouldn't observe it anyway.
Indeed, that is our understanding of where stars generally form. I assume that is why the article said "no stray stars". So, any thoughts on the evidence for that?
Black holes are the corpses of very massive stars (in general, there are also theorized to be micro-black holes produced in the early Universe). To find black holes, you have to look for where the stars are...namely galaxies.
Indeed, that is our understanding of how black holes form. But where is the evidence that they nevertheless don't abound in this hole?
Galaxies tend to form around the Dark Matter. Dark Matter has enough mass to hold the galaxy clusters together in the knots and filaments of large-scale structure.More importantly, galaxies are usually visible. Hence I didn't ask about galaxies.
In the voids between the filaments, there is little Dark Matter, otherwise galaxies would be attracted there.
Indeed, one might suppose so. My question though was regarding the evidence that there was no Dark Matter there.
That AP quote is just sensationalizing the discovery. Astronomers don't expect to observe stars, black holes or dark matter in voids, so the only reason to mention it in a media article in this manner is to be "poetic". The real question (see post above) is why is this void bigger than the rest.
One of the most interesting things about doing science is finding something you "don't expect to observe".

I know one shouldn't believe most of what you read, I just thought that since the article took the trouble to mention each of the possibilities mentioned above, perhaps there was evidence that the void didn't contain them and perhaps you knew something about this evidence.

[GoodGuysEatPie]

Indeed, that is our understanding of where stars generally form. I assume that is why the article said "no stray stars". So, any thoughts on the evidence for that?

Indeed, that is our understanding of how black holes form. But where is the evidence that they nevertheless don't abound in this hole?
More importantly, galaxies are usually visible. Hence I didn't ask about galaxies.

Indeed, one might suppose so. My question though was regarding the evidence that there was no Dark Matter there.

One of the most interesting things about doing science is finding something you "don't expect to observe".

I know one shouldn't believe most of what you read, I just thought that since the article took the trouble to mention each of the possibilities mentioned above, perhaps there was evidence that the void didn't contain them and perhaps you knew something about this evidence.

Everything I mentioned was an inference on my part. That there is nothing in the void is based on the single set of observations from the VLA Survey and the CMB survey. By themselves, those data sets would not reveal the presence of stars. The VLA Survey traces the radio emission from galaxies and collections of galaxies. The CMB is photons from the hot, dense gas of the early Universe. If dark matter is later revealed in copious amounts within these voids, then that would be very interesting, but that is beyond the scope of these two data sets.

Astronomers have examined other voids using multiple wavelengths, and have not found evidence of stars or dark matter inside them. If this new, large void is a giant version of the others, then it isn't a leap to extrapolate similar properties for it.

It could be argued that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and this is true. We have no evidence that the voids lack stars, black holes, or dark matter. That assumption is based on the observations and physical theory that we currently have for those phenomena.

We don't "see" black holes or dark matter. We infer their presence based on the way objects (stars, galaxies, rarified gas) behave around them, which is why I brought up galaxies before. Since there are no (or so few so as to be pragmatically considered zero) galaxies in the voids, we don't place much dark matter there. The same line of reasoning can be usd for black holes.

Does this mean that this newly discovered "hole in the Universe" contains no stars, black holes, or dark matter? No, but we can have a reasonable amount of confidence there are none. There will undoubtedly be follow-up observations of the "hole". I'm particularly interested in the X-ray data, which would reveal the presence of at least some kinds of gas/black holes/etc. :)

~goodguyseatpie~

[Dabljuh]

The cavity has been created by Von Neumann Probes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft), that eventually will turn the entire universe into Von Neuman Probes.

But they're still at least a billion years away, so don't be frightened.

[Sir Arthur Mortal Coyle]

Artists depiction.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070827.html

[skeptigirl]

That was the same diagram I posted, Sir A. But I can't make 3D sense of it.

[alfaniner]

That's the first astronomic picture I've ever seen that I found to be a bit scary.

[INRM]

It allegeldy has a very high gravitational effect... does this mean that part of the universe is starting to implode on itself?

[GoodGuysEatPie]

It allegeldy has a very high gravitational effect... does this mean that part of the universe is starting to implode on itself?

Probably not. Where did you read about the alledgedly high gravitational effect? What exactly was being affected?

~goodguyseatpie~

[Garrette]

Artists depiction.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070827.html The universe is a tipped-over psychedelic traffic cone?

[INRM]

The Universe is shaped like an upside down traffic cone? Are you serious?

[Solus]

I have my own theory it's actually hell! :boxedin: On a serious note it's beyond awe inspiring that such phenomena exist in this universe. The more that's learned about the universe reveals how little we humans actually know.

[skeptigirl]

The Universe is shaped like an upside down traffic cone? Are you serious?OK, it's actually even weirder than that.

Everywhere we look out in space reveals light reaching us from the past, so technically we are looking back in time. Not so weird until you then add that the Universe was extremely small at first then expanded tremendously.

Put the two together and what you really have to then picture is in every direction you are looking into the point of that cone. Think about it.

[tsg]

OK, it's actually even weirder than that.

Everywhere we look out in space reveals light reaching us from the past, so technically we are looking back in time. Not so weird until you then add that the Universe was extremely small at first then expanded tremendously.

Put the two together and what you really have to then picture is in every direction you are looking into the point of that cone. Think about it.

Is that like being at the north pole and facing south no matter which way you turn?

[skeptigirl]

Is that like being at the north pole and facing south no matter which way you turn?Much weirder. In your N pole scenario you merely need to conceptualize south is down.

Try conceptualizing looking in all directions from Earth and seeing the same single point in the distance. Whether you look up or down or out you are looking into the same cone of Universe which leads to the same end point.

[tsg]

Much weirder. In your N pole scenario you merely need to conceptualize south is down.

Try conceptualizing looking in all directions from Earth and seeing the same single point in the distance. Whether you look up or down or out you are looking into the same cone of Universe which leads to the same end point.

I think I get it. There is a train station near my home that, no matter what road you start on or in which direction you head you seem to always end up at. All roads lead to the Little Silver Train Station.

More seriously, all it really takes is to imagine your "line of sight" being bent.

[skeptigirl]

You can conceptualize bending a two dimensional line of sight fairly easily. It's pretty hard to conceptualize bending a three dimensional one. I suppose if I imagine that view more like the view in a fish eye lens, warping as I move my gaze, I can come close to picturing the view from Earth out into the Universe. But it is still pretty difficult.