Meet this super void, the scariest place in the Universe

A quarter of a billion light-years of emptiness is the emptiest place in the visible Universe. The Great Void has been troubling scientists for almost four decades, prompting the most unusual hypotheses of its origin.
Looking at the sky on a dark night, you may get the impression that the stars are spread evenly across space. However, this is not the case.

Stars gather into galaxies, and galaxies gather into gravitationally bound clusters of galaxies. In general, neighboring galaxies are quite close to each other on cosmic scales, and the void occupies not very large areas of space.

 

Looking at the sky on a dark night, you may get the impression that the stars are spread evenly across space. However, this is not the case. Stars gather into galaxies, and galaxies gather into gravitationally bound clusters of galaxies. In general, neighboring galaxies are quite close to each other on cosmic scales, and the void occupies not very large areas of space.

 

However, there is a special exception to this rule, the so-called Taurus void. This is an incredibly large region of empty space, and no other region like it can be seen anywhere else in the visible Universe.

 

This area was discovered in 1981 by astronomer Robert Kirshner and his team. The Taurus Void, sometimes called the Great Void, is a giant spherical region with very few galaxies. It is about 700 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Taurus (hence the name). Astronomers first told about their astonishing discovery in the article “A million cubic megaparsec void in Bootes”.

 

An empty void

This supervoid has a diameter of 330 million light-years, which in turn is 0.27Êf;% of the diameter of the visible Universe (93 billion light-years). The volume of this region is approximately 236 thousand cubic megaparsecs. In other words, it is the largest known void in the Universe.

 

After discovering the Taurus void, astronomers were quick to notice how unique this area is. At first, they were able to detect only eight galaxies there, although later they managed to detect more – 60 in the vast space, a quarter of a billion light-years in diameter. According to astronomer Greg Aldering, if the Milky Way was at the center of the Taurus void, we would not have learned about the existence of other galaxies until the 1960s .
By comparison, there are more than a couple of dozen neighboring galaxies in the three million light-year space that now surrounds the Milky Way. Considering that the average distance between galaxies in the Universe is several million light-years, there should be about 10,000 galaxies in such a huge space as the Taurus Void.

Like soap bubbles

 

It goes without saying that scientists are struggling to find out how such an anomalous region of space could have formed. Computer models show that the smaller voids — which are found much more often — formed when galaxies were pulled closer together by gravity. As a result, neighboring regions have been emptied, and as this process intensifies, such areas grow.

 

However, the emptiness of Jaučiaganis could not be explained in this way. Too little time has passed since the birth of the Universe for gravity to “clean up” space on such a scale.

In an effort to explain this phenomenon, a new theory has been developed, which states that supervoids are formed by the merging of smaller voids. Aldering noticed that galaxies in voids have an interesting tubular structure, and this could be an important hook. In addition, he hypothesized that the Taurus void was formed by the coalescence of smaller voids, similar to how soap bubbles coalesce into a large bubble. And “tube” galaxies are probably remnants of boundaries between smaller voids.

 

It is possible to imagine an even more radical option, which is rarely discussed in the scientific literature. The Oxherd Void may have formed during the expansion of a Type 3 civilization on the Kardashev scale. As colonization progresses, the bubble of civilization expands away from its home system, eclipsing all stars and then all galaxies in its path, enveloping them in a Dyson Sphere. This could also explain the rather regular sphericity of the void. Since the Taurus Void is about 700 million light-years from Earth, and intelligent life could have appeared in the Universe about four billion years ago, an ancient civilization would have been able to perform such amazing cosmological engineering without too much disruption. Yes, this is pure speculation, but considering the strangeness of the phenomenon itself, such a hypothesis cannot be ruled out.

 

A scary and empty place

 

The nature of emptiness is food for thought. Visitors to this area would be overwhelmed, to say the least, by such isolation, the vast distances between galaxies, and the darker-than-dark vistas of deep space.

 

The Simmering Life of a Vacuum: What Is There When Nothing Is.

What’s more, the Taurus void is probably the most “ideal” vacuum in space, so its effects should also be taken into account. In it, rare guests would be not only stones and dust, but also various particles. It could take eons for particles to interact with each other in such a vast void, if that’s even possible there.

 

Since the density of matter in this region of space is extremely low, any “structures” that have entered it – let’s say neutrinos – will look absolutely the same when they fly out on the other side hundreds of millions of years later. The same is true for photons. Particles much more massive than neutrinos and photons will be attracted to the edges of the void. As a result, the emptiness of Taurus can be seen as an ideal time capsule.

 

However, the discovery of the supervoid had a profound impact on traditional cosmological thinking. Astronomers have since repeatedly revised their understanding of galaxy formation in light of what is known about the highly uneven distribution of matter in the Universe.

 

After all, the Taurus void is another modest reminder of the infinity of space. The Universe we see is unimaginably large, and our place in it is astonishingly small and insignificant—a microscopic blip in a gigantic cosmos. However, no matter how small we seem to ourselves in our blue dot, when we look up at the sky, at least we can enjoy the starscape.