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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
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.
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.
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.
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."
The Universe has already been patched and this hole closed. However, due to the distances involved, the local mirrors available to Earth will only be updated to include the Universe-CURRENT version in around 6 to 10 billion years.
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.
"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.