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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.
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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.
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).
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.
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'
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. The full quote is: "What we've found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the universe."
That doesn't mean it's not normal per se. It means that this void is caused by some factor not previously observed or taken into account in simulations, i.e. "If these simulations were 100% correct, something like this couldn't occur."
(Let the speculations commence...)
...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
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
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.
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!
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".
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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."
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.
As requested, a pic.
[]
There. I even framed it for you.
If you copy and paste what's in the frame into something else, you can zoom in as far as you want.
Oh, I should mention that it's the negative.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
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.
Yes, but you are also sitting at the start point of the big bang. Every spot in the universe can make the same claim. "Big bang" is a cool name for it, but it's a bit of a misnomer, as there wasn't anywhere for an actual explosion to occur when it happened. Thinking of the big bang as having a point of origin is a bit like asking "what's outside the universe?" Just as with Oakland, there's no there there. I'd recommend Brian Green's The Elegeant Universe. It's focus is string theory, but to get there you have to go through relativity, the big bang theory and quantum mechanics, as they're all related. He's a gifted science writer and ties it all together in a very accessible way.
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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?"