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.""

Comments

Re:But how do they know?

[mr_mischief]

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:Normal

[pln2bz]

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), 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?