Sign up FAST! Login

Universe’s ‘Supervoid’ May Be the Largest Structure Ever Discovered By Humanity


Universe's 'Supervoid' May Be the Largest Structure Ever Discovered By Humanity â NOVA Next | PBS

Stashed in: The Universe, space, Space the Final Frontier?, space

To save this post, select a stash from drop-down menu or type in a new one:

Define "structure". :)

"thing"

DINGUS?

Dingus!  Yeah!

Macrodingus? Megadingus? Oh! Superdingus!

Superdingus or Supervoid would make super rock band names.  

Technically, the dingus is an orb:

Astronomers have discovered a barren cosmological orb 1.8 billion light-years wide.

Dubbed the “supervoid,” this immense stretch of relative emptiness (compared to the rest of the universe) helps solve one question scientists have been teasing apart for a decade. At the same time, it brings up a host of other questions that foreshadow an era of “exotic physics,” physics that will seem new and strange even to our most seasoned experts.

The supervoid has about 20% less cosmic material—galaxies, dust, etc.—than our part of the universe or any other area with typical density. It’s not exactly a void, since it’s not entirely empty. But when juxtaposed against other chunks of space, the supervoid appears a frigid wasteland.

“Frigid” may actually be the opportune word here. Scientists had been searching for a void in this region because they knew about the universe’s so-called “Cold Spot,” a part of the sky discovered 10 years ago that is unusually large and cold compared to what the CMB (cosmic microwave background) radiation—the thermal radiation leftover from the Big Bang—would have predicted for it. Over the last several years, they knew that if they could confirm that this part of the universe has a very low density, that would help explain why the Cold Spot exists, since photons speeding through an accelerating universe lose energy and cool as they cross a void.

sounds like this pocket of my beach that i swim through: an especially cold spot that seems to be devoid of life.

it gives me the creeps (that's usually where i turn around!).  i'm going to start calling it the jupiter dingus!

The Jupiter Dingus sounds like a good name for a book.

You May Also Like: