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]

God is giving you the goatse.

hm..

[tpwch]

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.

Common problem

[wombatmobile]

Next time, remove the lens cap.

Re:More info here

[UserGoogol]

Sounds like a whole lot of nothing to me.

Re:hm..

[phagstrom]

Just digging a hole to build a new bypass.

Homer Simpson was right

[Chlorus]

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]

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]

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

So basically the big news...

[Bin_jammin]

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.

yeah

[Almir]

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

Oh dear, I hadn't thought of that...

[BluBrick]

...said God, and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.

Not considered serious

[jsiren]

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:And all of a sudden....

[Anonymous Coward]

Old question to the Christians that insist we are the only intelligent life in the universe: Do you really think God gave up after just one mistake?

Newer question: Are you really sure we were the first mistake?

A hole in the universe?

[Vinegar Joe]

I blame George Bush.

Re:Well I guess the joke is on us.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

A billion light years...

[iminplaya]

How many Albert Halls is that?

Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

They wanted to call it Uranus, but that name was given

Re:More info here

[RAMMS+EIN]

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

Pictures?! Of nothing?!

Wow!

[Toreo asesino]

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

I just did laundry...

[mathfeel]

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

Re:So basically the big news...

[RuBLed]

We know that missions spawn there in deadspace..

One post, two eps, three oblig. Futurama quotes

[Dachannien]

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!

Re:hm..

[Anonymous Coward]

The answer: Mantrid drones

Re:Well I guess the joke is on us.

[serialdogma]

Not quite; it is no so much a hole in the goatse sense, but rather an lack of anything at all. If anything it is where the Invisible Pink Unicorn [wikipedia.org] lives.

Re:hm..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Yes, this seems like the most reasonable explaination.

Re:Not considered serious

[Welsh Dwarf]

I don't know about that, 6 billion light years away seems pretty remote to me!

fragmentation

[Carbon016]

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

Re:hm..

[Whiteox]

NO IT ISN'T!!!!

It's the MUTANT STAR GOAT!!!!

Those Golgafrincham's were right after all!

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

[loganrapp]

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

Did they? We're here.

I know what happened here.

[MOMOCROME]

Billions of years ago, the Emperor Gortron IV of the Hugalugag Empire discovered the existence of other intelligent races in neighboring solar systems. The very fact of this, the mere idea of other races so infuriated the Emperor that he decreed them all illegal and ordered his vast military machine to wipe them out.

His generals tried many different approaches but none served to eliminate the threat completely. In fact, often times, the attempt would so infuriate the enemy that they would buzz about the borderlands of the Empire for years on end, death-raying this, atomic blasting that until they could finally be stamped out by the Hugalugagians with plain old fashioned space wars. This only further enraged the Emperor, and so he held a contest open to any of his citizens that could fashion a means to end the threat once and for all without requiring the messiness of pitched combat and planetary siege. The race of Hugalugag was quite xenophobic from top to bottom, from the least peasant in the fields to the mighty Emperor on high, and so everyone turned their thoughts on how to eradicate the menace of 'otherness' that surrounded them.

One day a simple weaponsmith by the name of Nancypoo Gammatron approached the throne with his proposal. This took a great deal of courage, for when the Emperor listened to the proposals of all that had come before, he only listened far enough to find a potential weakness in the plan and immediately ordered the presenter disintegrated. Proposals had become infrequent of late, which in turn further enraged the already apoplectic Emperor when he thought on it. Nevertheless, Nancypoo felt he had a fine idea. His great innovation was all in the scale of things. The Hugalugugians would build a gun so gigantic that they could march it out to one enemy star system and use their sun as a bullet to shoot the sun of yet another enemy, and so on until all enemies even remotely able to reach them were reduced to ash before they knew what hit them.

The Emperor was pleased with this idea indeed. So impressed that he ordered ten thousand of these guns be made with all due haste. And though the Hugalugagians would need to dismantle much of their empire to construct the weapons, including many planets and stars of their own, and it would take millions of years to stage the attack, at the end, the Hugalugagians might finally have a sense of peace and security. Which is really what it is all about, in the end- assuaging the vague fears with brutal violence.

You can rest assured that the Emperor's forces cleaned out their own galaxy only to find the next galaxy over teaming with filthy others, and so the troops marched on, ever on, cleaning out one galaxy after another until any potential threat was addressed, a never ending assault on a reality that didn't jibe with their mean psychology and ancient traditions, until even today. For though we can only see a hole in the universe one billion light years across, you can bet that they've been hard at work all the time the light has taken to reach us way out here in our galaxy, so that even now there is a lonley little planet orbiting around a lonely little star in a void many times the size of the big blank spot we can make out from our hopefully remote-enough vantage point here in the Milky Way.
 

They DID it!

[martin-boundary]

They finally did it! Those Maniacs! They stopped Plan Nine and now they blew up their own solarbonite bombs! Damn them! Now the unstoppable chain reaction from their part of space has started! God damn them all to hell!

Re:There's a hole in my Universe

[Bastard of Subhumani]

I'm looking through a hole in the sky
I'm seeing nowhere through the eyes of a lie
I'm getting closer to the end of the line
I'm living easy where the sun doesn't shine

One of Black Sabbath's lesser known, but still excellent works [youtube.com].

Re:Not considered serious

[Calinous]

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

Re:More info here

[bluntshell]

you mean 'hole'...

this thread is useless ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... without pics

Re:Not considered serious

[mobby_6kl]

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 hole in THE UNIVERSE, you say??

[OriginalArlen]

Gosh, this IS exciting!!! So what's coming through the hole from outside the universe???? I can't wait to find out!!

Re:Well I guess the joke is on us.

[QuickFox]

God is giving you the goatse.

That explains why He put it in the constellation Eridanus.

Nothing to see here.

[Esion Modnar]

Move along.

Re:hm..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, we could do a lot better, but we'd rather spend the day posting bullshit on slashdot, thank you.

Re:Well I guess the joke is on us.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Coincidentally

[maroberts]

I have just found a large hole in my sock, which is expanding, I wonder if my socks are an analogue of the Universe. or is it only the left one?

Re:More info here

[Griim]

From the great people who brought you pictures of something

Stay the hell away from there !

[vegiVamp]

We don't want the Krikkit guys knowing we're out here.

OK, who's tracking 'Q'?

[Ora*DBA]

If the Hubble spots five different Enterprises by that hole, I'm outta here...

Re:this thread is useless ...

[QMO]

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:Viral

[Goobermunch]

I can see it now: An alien race needs styrofoam to truly thrive. Billions of years ago, they send out little bits of organic materials precoded to end up with styrofoam. Time passes. Dinosaurs evolve and die (not due to any meteor strike, but because their DNA has an innate kill switch). Mankind evolves and learns to extract the decayed leftovers of the dinosaurs from the Earth's crust. We develop the technology to make styrofoam.

Now that we've fulfilled our evolutionary purpose, it's our time to go away like the dinosaurs.

Of course, the aliens who created us, they're thinking . . . "okay, these things we've created . . . they can be killed by viruses right? Okay, and they like sex a whole lot, right? So what we need is a deadly virus that is passed by sex."

Is it any surprise that the AIDS epidemic really took off about the same time McDonald's stopped using Styrofoam? I think not!

--AC

Re:Well I guess the joke is on us.

[tomzyk]

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

Re:Well I guess the joke is on us.

[Himring]

Haha! I love to make fun of God, cuz God's a got a sense of hu....

NO CARRIER

Re:Wow!

[uberjoe]

I hear photos of holes are actually pretty popular on the internets.

Re:Well I guess the joke is on us.

[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]

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

Re:And all of a sudden....Dust mites.

[corifornia]

Breaking news, jesus was satan.
Lucifer is a Latin word meaning "light-bearer" (from lux, lucis, "light", and ferre, "to bear, bring"), a Roman astrological term for the "Morning Star"http://http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer [http]
I, Jesus, have sent My angel to testify to you these things for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright Morning Star. (Rev 22:16). Is he admitting it?
While divination and magic are a sin, Jesus performs "miracles" seemingly at will. Whats the difference between a Miracle and Magic?
Second Commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before me
Yet, most christian faiths worship Jesus before God. Jesus is the symbol of their faith, not the "True Creator" or "God." Wouldn't it just be a nice simple trick for the devil, whos primary role is to take souls away from God, to come to earth and trick millions of followers into following a false prophet.

I dunno, just an idea. Think for yourself.

Re:Repeat after me ...

[Mateo_LeFou]

The important question is, can little people use it to rob Napoleon and Sean Connery and others?

Re:Repeat after me ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole point of the story is that there is _no_ dark matter in the thing.

No dark matter, no black holes, no spinning frames of reference... does this mean physicists have finally found a region of the universe where they can actually explain what's going on?

It brought this situation to mind. . .

[Zobeid]

There's something very important I forgot to tell you.

What?

Don't cross the streams.

Why?

It would be bad.

I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad?"

Try to imagine the instant annihilation of all matter and energy within 500 million light years of here.

Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.

Re:Well I guess the joke is on us.

[Pepebuho]

Are you suggesting a hands off approach to this deep issue?

Re:Ya forgot to read the ending...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not having the wool pulled over your eyes, that's trying to wear the sheep like a balaclava.

Re:Well I guess the joke is on us.

[Guppy06]

I can think of so many things I'd like to do with that woman (does she have any buttons on her shirt fastened?), but no, let's show her goatse instead.

And you wonder why you're all virgins.