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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.""
God is giving you the goatse.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
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.
Posted by a Debian GNU/Linux user
Now this is *big* news ! The scientific world is waiting for good explanations.
More info here (with pictures..)
http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2007/coldspot/index.shtml
Next time, remove the lens cap.
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 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...
...and it was overlooked all this time. How's that for a security flaw?
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
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.
don't worry about it, god is patching that on tuesday.
...said God, and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
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.
Usage: km/h for speed (kilometers per hour); kph for very slow impulses (kilopond hours).
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?
How many Albert Halls is that?
What?
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.
How can it not be normal if it occurs in nature?
Declaring something is not normal because it doesn't agree with our imperfect idea about how things work seems to be the wrong way about it to me.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
A photo of a hole...in the the biggest emptiness in the universe. I can see that one winning competitions.
throw new NoSignatureException();
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'
...so that's where my socks went.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
This isn't really a "hole", it's more of a void.
Nevertheless, mathematically, it is possible to have holes in a body without anything being "outside" the body.
That must be the surface of the universe, it's just an inside-out shape, concave at every point!
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!
Universe needs to stop running defrag every few million years, it's leaving giant empty space holes and confusing the scientists.
Not to be nagging, but maybe cosmology is not common as knowledge as you would like to think, references to easily readable information should always accommodate a post like that, or it will easily come of as slightly elitist and patronizing flamebait instead of something useful and informative. :p
www.aleo.no
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.
Yep, and if that gives one a big "huh!" look, the idea is that space expands by increasing the distance between matter, "stretching" spacetime itself, and doesn't expand inside something. There is no "something" on the outside, not even vacuum, because vacuum is a lack of matter, not a lack of spacetime. So it's a bit like a surface of a balloon expanding if you blow it up (= big bang), and wherever you go on that surface, you are always at the "center" from your point of view.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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!
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.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
I am not an astronomer/astrophysicis, but this is a really interesting story, it's a real shame that 80% of the >filter comments are "Funny".
My Starcraft 2 Blog
No, it's completely wrong.
Every point in the universe today is where the Big Bang occurred. You can see it right now. Just look around you.
Understand that space itself expanded from the starting point. All points of space in the universe today where infinitely closer together 13.7 billion years ago. The Big Bang did not expand outward into a mostly empty universe. The Big Bang occurred in a universe that was entirely full of extremely dense matter. As space expanded, the matter became less packed. You get the idea...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
... without pics
Move along.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
One of the fundamental approximations in modern cosmology is that the universe is both isotropic and homogeneous over large scales (such as those which treat galaxies as point objects). This size hole s fairly big, and is noticeable on even this scale. This means there could be a special point in the universe, which caused all sorts of problems. Does this mean we have to re-think our basic theory of cosmology, or is this size hole possible under current theories, even if it is extremely unlikely to form. (the universe is a big place, even if something has a minuscule probability it still could happen somewhere out there. Personally I think it was placed there by the universe to test our belief in God not existing.
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.
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?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Not. It says that the only thing you can say is that you perceive them as happening right now, but you know they happened at different times in the past. A different observer would not certainly not perceive the same simultaneity - obviously, because they are in a differnt place so would have different speed-of-light delays. But if they worked back to when the supernovae "really" happened, they would not necessarily see the suparnovae being the same time-distance away, or with the same time-distance between them.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
We don't want the Krikkit guys knowing we're out here.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
For an excellent discussion on the topic of space-time, pick up Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.
Great read for the technically adept layman on what space-time is and how it "works".
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
If the Hubble spots five different Enterprises by that hole, I'm outta here...
Perhaps this was the start point for the big bang ???
.....
Just fishing wildy here
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
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
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?
"We don't know one millionth of one percent about anything" -- Thomas Edison. Think about it. Light travels roughly 5.8 trillion miles in a year. Our galaxy is about 120,000 light years across, give or take 40,000 light years, and it contains an estimated 100 billion stars (scientists are only guessing; they can't see them all). This newly reported area of "dark matter" (translation: uh, we don't know what it is), is a billion light years across -- a billion light years. Any attempt to place definitive explanations on the origins of the universe, its size, how it is expanding (or not), and what fills it, is an exercise in lunacy. We're like blind people feeling away in the dark and trying to describe what we can't even touch. We don't even know what a black hole is; we're only guessing based on what happens at the event horizon. Science is a great discipline -- I fell in love with it even before college -- but the scientific community needs an enormous dose of humility; and that's not something I see a lot of these days. Every news story that I see about scientific discovery is more often than not missing huge qualifiers, such as scientists theorize that... Think about it. The laws of physics that apply to us here and in the space that immediately surrounds our infinitesimally small portion of our galaxy may not apply in other regions of the universe -- of that I'm convinced based on what we can't explain. It's an amazing universe. Personally, I can't wait to see what we stumble on next.
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 ----
When you have a bunch of yahoos shouting about their imaginary friend every chance they get, and trying to force their 2000-year-old slasher novel down everyone's throats, it becomes much more difficult to use the proper qualifiers. You almost have to make assertions in that situation, so you don't get shouted down: "You don't know? HA! It must be Jeebus, then! See, you guys are all going to Hell! Jeebus, Jeebus, Jeebus..." It's wrong to state things as fact, but I can't really fault people for doing it.
Those of us who are brave and smart enough to accept the answer of "we don't know" are in the minority. Maybe someday in the future, we can get the God-botherers to shut up long enough to make the methodology of science widely enough understood to be able to speak intelligently in public about the findings of science.
But unfortunately, I'm not holding my breath.
"Oh boy! Are we going to try something dangerous?"
Don't forget a liberal's integrity.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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.
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.
The Bible isn't a slasher novel, it's a love story. It's about these kids who run away from home seeking independence and what they perceive as life's true fulfillment, and a father who desperately tries to get them to return. The father pleads with them for years to come home and enjoy the shelter and comfort of his house, but they continue to ignore him until finally the father makes a tremendous sacrifice in order to open the door for them to return. Some of the children realize the father's sacrifice and unconditional love he has for them, and come home. The others continue to wander aimlessly. The subtle, but real, plot of the story is that the father knew all along what it was going to take to be reunited with his children, but he also knew he had to let his children suffer in order for them to realize what they'd given up and the importance of the sacrifice it was going to take to save them. You should read the whole book sometime. It's amazing!