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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.""
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.
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'
If the civilization blew itself up, we would probably see some sign of the super-heated matter being ejected from the region. More likely is that the civilization gobbled up all the available matter and then decided to slip into a universe with favorable physical properties and more room for computation.
That must be the surface of the universe, it's just an inside-out shape, concave at every point!
Your understanding of cosmology is deeply flawed. You clearly know nothing about the metric expansion of spacetime, or else you would see the absurdity of declaring any particular spot in space to be "the center" of the Big Bang.
This reminds me of studies of young children who were asked to model the Earth using clay and to place small plastic houses on their model anywhere where they thought people lived on the real Earth. At a certain age, the most common result is a ball of clay with a top that's either slightly or completely flattened, and houses placed only there. The Earth is round, as everyone knows, but people can't live in sideways or upside down houses, so most of the Earth's surface is uninhabitable. Obviously.
The children believe in the verbal sentence "the world is round" with no idea what it actually means, so in their heads it just describes the shape of the dirt on the bottom of a flat Earth. In modern times, people hear that the universe is expanding, take it on trust because science has a great reputation, and they devise intuitively appealing fantasies in their minds where, somewhere out there in space, there exists a point that everything is moving away from. Fantasies where the Universe cannot be larger than a sphere 13.7 billion light years in diameter because everything came from the Big Bang, nothing can travel faster than light, and they heard once on PBS that the Universe is 13.7 billion years old. The existence of galaxies outside of this limiting sphere would violate these obvious truths, and would be just as absurd as people living in sideways houses. I mean, jeeze, what would stop them from falling out of the windows?
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:
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/ast22f
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?
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
People appear to not actually understand that this is a problem for the mainstream theories. It's quite surreal, actually.
3 41295
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=278497&cid=20
If anybody notices it, that one's gonna stir the pot!
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
Sorry for the language. What the fuck? That is impossible. It must be some sort of equipment error or methodological mistake. Please go look at the parent's picture, it must be some sort of joke news page for the issue, seriously. It's amazing.
...possible: Image of the Hole
Here's a higher res image of exactly what I'm talking about. I can't find anything that indicates this is an artist rendition rather than an actual map, other than the fact that they used the word 'illustration' just once on the previous page. Please help me figure this out, because I know a hole like this cannot possibly be
I mean here Heim's corrected gravitional law.
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.
Perhaps this was the start point for the big bang ???
.....
Just fishing wildy here
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
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?
There is a concept that using advanced technologies energy emissions will be captured and used to fuel computronium.
Perhaps this 'hole' is in effect an advanced varient of this technology which is in fact absorbing and using ALL available energy in the region. This might be exactly what we would expect to see from a high order energy collection activity.
This is going to be a great building point for some new cosmology to come up with a consistent explanation for this. The astrophysics department at my school is really into the CMB (cosmic microwave background, mapped by WMAP) so I'm sure they'll be looking into this too.
This void is around 450M light years wide. An advanced civilization expanding for a billion or so of years would produce this kind of void by capturing and using all radiated energy for its own use.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
That has a different definition to me, this looks more like just an absence of ' stuff '.
A 'hole' to me, would make the assumption there is 'tear' and there is an 'other side' involved. I don't see either in this story. ( nor would there be much of a way to prove a hole either.. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A number of years ago the late Dr. Robert L. Forward published some notions about this Question:
"How did the Big Bang get around the Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy?"
The suggested answer involves "negative" mass/energy, a thing which is very different from "anti-matter".
One conclusion is that the huge voids in the Universe (there are many many more than just that big one) hold superclusters of galaxies made of negative mass/energy; it doesn't mix well with ordinary mass/energy because the two types gravitationally repel each other --and we can't see those superclusters because our eyes and current instruments don't register negative-energy photons.
For more about negative-mass/energy theory, you might read this.
Sounds like *your* god has a thing for BDSM, dude.
As a friend of mine once remarked, "Christianity is nothing but institutionalized Stockholm Syndrome."
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.