The Largest Nothingness Known to Man Has Just Been Discovered

And it isn't Paris Hilton, Britney Spears or that other guy I don't want to mention anymore ... it's actually nearly a billion light-years across! :yikes:

http://www.physorg.com/news107109720.html

Quote:

---

University of Minnesota astronomers have found an enormous hole in the Universe, nearly a billion light-years across, empty of both normal matter such as stars, galaxies and gas, as well as the mysterious, unseen “dark matter.” While earlier studies have shown holes, or voids, in the large-scale structure of the Universe, this new discovery dwarfs them all.

---

Here's some comparision to other "holes" in the universe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_(astronomy)

Fredi

Interesting.

But how about this.

I understand that to see the 'Big Bang' (or to get as close as a +/- 1 billion years after the event) we are collecting light that has been travelling for that amount of time.

My question is, which direction is that light coming from? From where to astronomers point their collective sky-scanning equipment to collect this light data?

Just a question that occurred to me this morning.

(I'm reading 'The God Delusion' and it talks about the start of the Universe, if anyone is actually thinking I just happened to start considering such things)

What I wonder is how that area looks now. As mentioned in the article the "hole" is roughly 6-10 billion light-years from Earth, so what we see was there 6-10 billion years ago, so by now that thing must be either much bigger or maybe, who knows, not even empty anymore.

Fredi

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by hurricaneone

My question is, which direction is that light coming from? From where to astronomers point their collective sky-scanning equipment to collect this light data?

---

Any direction. All you have to do is look at something 13 billion lightyears away and you are looking 13 billion years back in time. This means that if you look at a place where there is nothing, then you see the light sent out by the big bang. This means that if look at a place where there is nothing, then it will look exactly the same as any other place where there is nothing, because the light comes from the same place. Wherever you look in the universe, it all looks exactly the same, as long as you don't see a star. (Actually it doesn't look exactly the same, because the light has been distorted by all the heavy mass it has passed, so it might have redshifted or bent or something, but it looks pretty much the same).