The Most Terrifying Places In The Universe: Voids And Supervoids
First one. The Boötes void.
Discovered by astronomer Robert Kirshner and his team back in 1981, the Boötes void, sometimes called the Great Void, is a huge, spherical region of space that contains very few galaxies. It’s approximately 700 million light-years from Earth and is located near the constellation Boötes, which is how it got its name. The researchers originally published their surprising discovery in their paper, “A million cubic megaparsec void in Bootes.”
It is the largest void known in the universe so far.
Soon after its discovery, astronomers began to notice just how incredibly sparse the area really was. At first, they were only able to find eight galaxies across the expanse, but further observations revealed a total of 60 galaxies. Now, while that might still seem like a lot, it would be like stumbling upon 60 mile-long objects across a region larger than the continental United States (and that’s just in two dimensions). According to astronomer Greg Aldering, the scale of the void is such that, “If the Milky Way had been in the centre of the Boötes void, we wouldn’t have known there were other galaxies until the 1960s.”
Another famous void is the one astronomers found in the Taurus constellation.
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