Astronomers Find Huge Hole in Universe

realwx writes "Astronomers are surprised by a recent discovery of a space hole that is nearly a billion light years across. "Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size," said researcher Lawrence Rudnick of the University of Minnesota. Rudnick's colleague Liliya R. Williams also had not anticipated this finding. "What we've found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the universe," said Williams, also of the University of Minnesota.""

Well I guess the joke is on us.

[earnest murderer (888716)]

God is giving you the goatse.

Re:Well I guess the joke is on us.

[by Anonymous Coward]

The look [flickr.com] on the lead astronomer's face when she found this discovery is priceless!

Re:Well I guess the joke is on us.

[QuickFox (311231)]

God is giving you the goatse.

That explains why He put it in the constellation Eridanus.

Re:Well I guess the joke is on us.

[by Anonymous Coward]

that's a bit of a stretch, don't you think?

Re:Well I guess the joke is on us.

[tomzyk (158497)]

Don't be so anal about it; he's only trying to make a joke.

Re:Well I guess the joke is on us.

[by Anonymous Coward]

OK, let's get a grip here. More bad jokes will tear this thread apart.

Re:Well I guess the joke is on us.

[cmburns69 (169686)]

Why don't you guys just put a cork in it! I'm trying to work here!

Repeat after me ...

[Lucas123 (935744)]

"We don't know one millionth of one percent about anything" -- Thomas Edison. Think about it. Light travels roughly 5.8 trillion miles in a year. Our galaxy is about 120,000 light years across, give or take 40,000 light years, and it contains an estimated 100 billion stars (scientists are only guessing; they can't see them all). This newly reported area of "dark matter" (translation: uh, we don't know what it is), is a billion light years across -- a billion light years. Any attempt to place definitive explanations on the origins of the universe, its size, how it is expanding (or not), and what fills it, is an exercise in lunacy. We're like blind people feeling away in the dark and trying to describe what we can't even touch. We don't even know what a black hole is; we're only guessing based on what happens at the event horizon. Science is a great discipline -- I fell in love with it even before college -- but the scientific community needs an enormous dose of humility; and that's not something I see a lot of these days. Every news story that I see about scientific discovery is more often than not missing huge qualifiers, such as scientists theorize that... Think about it. The laws of physics that apply to us here and in the space that immediately surrounds our infinitesimally small portion of our galaxy may not apply in other regions of the universe -- of that I'm convinced based on what we can't explain. It's an amazing universe. Personally, I can't wait to see what we stumble on next.

Re:Repeat after me ...

[shawn(at)fsu (447153)]

Actually the article said it was devoid of "dark matter", they freely admit they have no idea what this void is.

Humility is no longer allowed

[markbt73 (1032962)]

When you have a bunch of yahoos shouting about their imaginary friend every chance they get, and trying to force their 2000-year-old slasher novel down everyone's throats, it becomes much more difficult to use the proper qualifiers. You almost have to make assertions in that situation, so you don't get shouted down: "You don't know? HA! It must be Jeebus, then! See, you guys are all going to Hell! Jeebus, Jeebus, Jeebus..." It's wrong to state things as fact, but I can't really fault people for doing it.

Those of us who are brave and smart enough to accept the answer of "we don't know" are in the minority. Maybe someday in the future, we can get the God-botherers to shut up long enough to make the methodology of science widely enough understood to be able to speak intelligently in public about the findings of science.

But unfortunately, I'm not holding my breath.

hm..

[tpwch (748980)]

Maybe its a civilization that managed to blow themselves out of history trought an accident somehow? If it is, I hope we can control that technology better when we advance enough to have it.

Re:hm..

[phagstrom (451510)]

Just digging a hole to build a new bypass.

Big Bang Start Point ???

[Ex-MislTech (557759)]

Perhaps this was the start point for the big bang ???

Just fishing wildy here .....

Re:Big Bang Start Point ???

[eddy the lip (20794)]

Yes, but you are also sitting at the start point of the big bang. Every spot in the universe can make the same claim. "Big bang" is a cool name for it, but it's a bit of a misnomer, as there wasn't anywhere for an actual explosion to occur when it happened. Thinking of the big bang as having a point of origin is a bit like asking "what's outside the universe?" Just as with Oakland, there's no there there. I'd recommend Brian Green's The Elegeant Universe. It's focus is string theory, but to get there you have to go through relativity, the big bang theory and quantum mechanics, as they're all related. He's a gifted science writer and ties it all together in a very accessible way.

Re:this thread is useless ...

[QMO (836285)]

As requested, a pic.

[]

There. I even framed it for you.
If you copy and paste what's in the frame into something else, you can zoom in as far as you want.

Oh, I should mention that it's the negative.

Re:hm..

[0xABADC0DA (867955)]

More likely still is that the server responsible for simulating that section of the universe crashed and hasn't been restarted yet (or will never restart). The civilization there probably started using too many quantum calculations causing the simulation to take too long doing useless things like reversing encryption keys instead of sending us more photons.

In any case, I would not worry about this since we'll probably just be rolled back to a known-good state once the problem has been fixed.

More info here

[Mr Europe (657225)]

Now this is *big* news ! The scientific world is waiting for good explanations.

More info here (with pictures..)
http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2007/coldspot/index.shtml [nrao.edu]

Re:More info here

[UserGoogol (623581)]

Sounds like a whole lot of nothing to me.

Re:More info here

[Randomly (858836)]

Here's a link to the original paper:

http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0704/0704.0 908v2.pdf [lanl.gov]

Re:More info here

[RAMMS+EIN (578166)]

``More info here (with pictures..)''

Pictures?! Of nothing?!

Wow!

[Toreo asesino (951231)]

A photo of a hole...in the the biggest emptiness in the universe. I can see that one winning competitions.

Re:More info here

[mikael (484)]

I'm confused on one point. (This is not a flame). Why would photons going through a void lose energy?

The energy of a photon is directly proportional to the frequency and inversely proportional to the wavelength.

Photoelectric effect [asu.edu]

Shorter wavelengths of a photon (ultra-violet, X-rays, Gamma rays) have more energy than longer wavelengths (visible light, infra-red).

Photons that we see from distant parts of the universe become affected by red-shift [wikipedia.org] - anything moving away from us ends up with a longer wavelength that we would have seen if it were stationary. But this can also be caused by gravititional effects (time dialation causes by massive objects).

If the object is moving towards us, then the photos become affects by blue shift [wikipedia.org].

When a spiral galaxy is observed, the side moving towards the observer will have a slight blue shift, because the photon wavelength has been decreased.

The photons in the void must be getting a longer wavelength somehow - perhaps the spacetime continuum is expanding more there than it is where there is ordinary matter.

Common problem

[wombatmobile (623057)]

Next time, remove the lens cap.

Homer Simpson was right

[Chlorus (1146335)]

Your theory of a donut shaped universe intrigues me, Homer. I may have to steal it. That's the first thing I thought of when I read this.

The Itching Question

[RuBLed (995686)]

The scientists had just recently answered the bugging question "Is there a hole on Mars?" but now they too had answered a bigger question still.. "Is there a hole out there, in the expanse of the universe?"

A great day to be alive....

Well I guess the ones who used to live out there had something similar like our LHC...

A hole nearly a billion lightyears across...

[mrjb (547783)]

...and it was overlooked all this time. How's that for a security flaw?

Re:A hole nearly a billion lightyears across...

[loganrapp (975327)]

Be fair, They actually caught it before anything nasty came through.

Did they? We're here.

So basically the big news...

[Bin_jammin (684517)]

is that in the middle of all of infinite space, they've now found space without anything in it? Let me know when they build something exciting there.

Re:So basically the big news...

[RuBLed (995686)]

We know that missions spawn there in deadspace..

yeah

[Almir (1096395)]

don't worry about it, god is patching that on tuesday.

Not considered serious

[jsiren (886858)]

The hole is not considered serious, since it is not remotely exploitable. It will be fixed in Universe 1.1, which is to be released shortly.

Re:Not considered serious

[Calinous (985536)]

So many millions years, and only a remote hole in the default install

Re:Not considered serious

[mobby_6kl (668092)]

The Universe has already been patched and this hole closed. However, due to the distances involved, the local mirrors available to Earth will only be updated to include the Universe-CURRENT version in around 6 to 10 billion years.

A billion light years...

[iminplaya (723125)]

How many Albert Halls is that?

I just did laundry...

[mathfeel (937008)]

...so that's where my socks went.

One post, two eps, three oblig. Futurama quotes

[Dachannien (617929)]

Fry: Let me ask you something. Has anyone ever discovered a hole in nothing with monsters in it? 'Cause if I'm the first, I want them to call it a "Fry Hole".

---

Fry: So what do you nerds want?
Nichelle Nichols: It's about that rip in space-time that you saw.
Stephen Hawking: I call it a Hawking Hole.
Fry: No fair! I saw it first!
Stephen Hawking: Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?

---

Farnsworth: Yes, we tore the universe a new space-hole, alright. But it's clenching shut fast!

fragmentation

[Carbon016 (1129067)]

Universe needs to stop running defrag every few million years, it's leaving giant empty space holes and confusing the scientists.

I am disappointed

[Shohat (959481)]

I am not an astronomer/astrophysicis, but this is a really interesting story, it's a real shame that 80% of the >filter comments are "Funny".

Nothing to see here.

[Esion Modnar (632431)]

Move along.

Breakdown of modern cosmology

[Ginger_Chris (1068390)]

One of the fundamental approximations in modern cosmology is that the universe is both isotropic and homogeneous over large scales (such as those which treat galaxies as point objects). This size hole s fairly big, and is noticeable on even this scale. This means there could be a special point in the universe, which caused all sorts of problems. Does this mean we have to re-think our basic theory of cosmology, or is this size hole possible under current theories, even if it is extremely unlikely to form. (the universe is a big place, even if something has a minuscule probability it still could happen somewhere out there. Personally I think it was placed there by the universe to test our belief in God not existing.

Isn't that a confirmation of Heim Theory?

[Zdzicho00 (912806)]

See: Heim Theory [wikipedia.org]

I mean here Heim's corrected gravitional law [engon.de].
See that snippet:

The CMB is an imprint of radiation left from the Big Bang, the theoretical beginning of the universe.

"Although our surprising results need independent confirmation, the slightly colder temperature of the CMB in this region appears to be caused by a huge hole devoid of nearly all matter roughly 6 to 10 billion light-years from Earth," Rudnick said.

Photons of the CMB gain a small amount of energy when they pass through normal regions of space with matter, the researchers explained. But when the CMB passes through a void, the photons lose energy, making the CMB from that part of the sky appear cooler.

Now have a look on Heim's corrected gravitional law:

Any mass which is situated in the range between the upper border distance R0 and must overcome a very weak repulsion force, if it wants to approach the source of field. Since this effect occurs only for very large distances, it is practically not observable.

And:

Finally Heim found that cosmic red shift too is a result of the corrected gravitation law. Therefore each particle of this world must approach primarily against the repulsive gravitation component of almost the whole remaining world. (This corresponds to the field curve between and R0.) This is using energy whereby each photon becomes longer in it's wavelength during this journey.

What do you think about this? Is there any other explanation for this phenomena?
One more thing. Mumbling about mysterious Dark Mater or Dark Energy isn't an answer.

/Z

Why should this be a surprise?

[brundlefly (189430)]

If the universe is "infinite", then there's plenty of room for lots of strange anomalies out there. A region which has nothing in it is just a blerp in the standard distribution of matter. One which would seem entirely consistent with anomalies in random distributions, sequences, etc.

Not only that, but since the universe is constantly expanding and at an ever-increasing rate, greater and greater becomes the possibility of finding big "holes".

Cool, yes. But it doesn't really surprise me at all. Then again, I'm just a programmer so what do I know?

Re:But how do they know?

[mr_mischief (456295)]

No. That's what makes it interesting, is that there's no way to shine a light on such a big area. ;-)

I don't think they're saying it's necessarily like this now or that it will continue to be like this. What they're saying is that right now, as observed, this region of space shows these odd properties. That means that at the time the light and other radiation being observed around it would have passed by it or through it, that it was huge and as far as our scientists know very odd. I don't think any long-term study of it is required to find out that much.

Re:But how do they know?

[AlecC (512609)]

Not. It says that the only thing you can say is that you perceive them as happening right now, but you know they happened at different times in the past. A different observer would not certainly not perceive the same simultaneity - obviously, because they are in a differnt place so would have different speed-of-light delays. But if they worked back to when the supernovae "really" happened, they would not necessarily see the suparnovae being the same time-distance away, or with the same time-distance between them.

Re:its the center of the big bang

[ElderKorean (49299)]

The unfortunate flaw in your comment, is that with a universe that started from a simple point (like ours) then all locations in the universe are at the centre, no matter how far things have spread out.

Reminds me of a Babylon 5 quote.
'There is a hole in your mind'

Re:its the center of the big bang

[Jugalator (259273)]

Yep, and if that gives one a big "huh!" look, the idea is that space expands by increasing the distance between matter [wikipedia.org], "stretching" spacetime itself, and doesn't expand inside something. There is no "something" on the outside, not even vacuum, because vacuum is a lack of matter, not a lack of spacetime. So it's a bit like a surface of a balloon expanding if you blow it up (= big bang), and wherever you go on that surface, you are always at the "center" from your point of view.

Re:Normal

[Baumi (148744)]

How can it not be normal if it occurs in nature?

Declaring something is not normal because it doesn't agree with our imperfect idea about how things work seems to be the wrong way about it to me.

The full quote is: "What we've found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the universe."

That doesn't mean it's not normal per se. It means that this void is caused by some factor not previously observed or taken into account in simulations, i.e. "If these simulations were 100% correct, something like this couldn't occur."

(Let the speculations commence...)

Re:Normal

[pln2bz (449850)]

I think you guys are missing the point. The void correlates with a cold spot within the CMB. The CMB is not supposed to have artifacts. It's supposed to be unrelated to the items between us and it. When you find a relation, that would tend to suggest that the CMB may have a more local source -- which actually threatens the primary proof for the Big Bang in the first place.

If I may, can I suggest that you guys are not being skeptical about what you're reading? I don't mean to be critical here, but a local source for the CMB would confirm what the Electric Universe Theorists have been telling people for some time now: that the CMB is an electric fog that is generated locally.

I highly recommend that you pay attention to the logic being used at the end of the article:

Photons of the CMB gain a small amount of energy when they pass through normal regions of space with matter, the researchers explained. But when the CMB passes through a void, the photons lose energy, making the CMB from that part of the sky appear cooler.

At some point in time within the development of the Big Bang Theory, it became normal to say that light can be absorbed more by nothingness than by matter. In another article here (http://science.nasa.gov/NEWHOME/headlines/ast22fe b99_1.htm [nasa.gov]), they explain this theory, called the Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect:

The Universe is filled with conglomerations of galaxies called clusters that are millions of light years across, consisting of hundreds or thousands of galaxies held together by gravity. Mostly clusters have atmospheres of very hot gas that we can see because of the X-rays they emit. Sunyaev and Zeldovich realized that something interesting happens when a CMBR photon passes through such a cluster. There is a good chance that it will collide with one of the electrons in the hot atmosphere. In the process, some photons would gain energy while others would lose energy. At microwave radio frequencies, they predicted, the intensity of the CMBR would appear to be depleted in the direction of the cluster because the photons would be "scattered" to other frequencies outside the microwave frequency band. This process is called the Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect.

[...]

Typically, the deficit in the CMBR is only 0.05% of the cosmic microwave background intensity. Detecting these small perturbations requires lots of observing time and painstaking data reduction.

So, the SZ effect allows them to explain away the fact that some galaxies are not casting shadows against the CMB. If there isn't a shadow for some of them, then perhaps that's because the photons are being energized by the obstruction. One is left wondering if the nothingness in the void is absorbing the quantity of light that they were predicting that nothingness should even absorb?

But, let me ask you guys this: Isn't it just possible that the cold spot *is* related to the void, and that the Big Bang is a paradigm in its death throws?

Re:Maybe

[VagaStorm (691999)]

Not to be nagging, but maybe cosmology is not common as knowledge as you would like to think, references to easily readable information should always accommodate a post like that, or it will easily come of as slightly elitist and patronizing flamebait instead of something useful and informative. :p

Re:Maybe

[osu-neko (2604)]

No, it's completely wrong.

Every point in the universe today is where the Big Bang occurred. You can see it right now. Just look around you.

Understand that space itself expanded from the starting point. All points of space in the universe today where infinitely closer together 13.7 billion years ago. The Big Bang did not expand outward into a mostly empty universe. The Big Bang occurred in a universe that was entirely full of extremely dense matter. As space expanded, the matter became less packed. You get the idea...