This is so cool. Astronomers have found an enormous void in space that measures nearly a billion light-years across. It is empty of both normal matter - such as galaxies and stars - and the mysterious “dark matter” that cannot be seen directly with telescopes.
The “hole” is located in the direction of the Eridanus constellation and has been identified in data from a survey of the sky made at radio wavelengths. Previous sky surveys that have traced the large-scale structure of the nearby Universe have long shown, for example, how the clustering of galaxies is strung into vast filaments and sheets that are separated by great gaps. But this void is about 1,000 times the volume of what would be expected in typical cosmic gaps. If you were to travel at the speed of light, it would take you several years to get to the nearest stars in our own Milky Way galaxy; but if you were to go to this hole and enter one side, you’d have to travel for a billion years before you would get to the other side.
Carzy part is that a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill physics Professor, Laura Mersini-Houghton, made a staggering claim. She says, “Standard cosmology cannot explain such a giant cosmic hole” and goes further with the ground-breaking hypothesis that the huge void is “… the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own“.
Click through to read on if you want but this is crazy cool. Like Einstein discussing relativity early on, it could maybe be crazy science fiction coming true!
