Great 'cosmic nothingness' Found

 

Yesterday the BBC, the New Scientist (Sorry! All the sites in the New Scientist network are down for scheduled maintenance today- Aug 25. Please try again tomorrow ) and other websites and publications announced the discovery of a void/empty spot in space at least 1000 times larger than they had expected to exist. Some highlights from the BBC coverage follow below.

 

Astronomers have found an enormous void in space that measures nearly a billion light-years across. It is empty of both normal matter - such as galaxies and stars - and the mysterious "dark matter" that cannot be seen directly with telescopes. ........snip!

 

"If you were to travel at the speed of light, it would take you several years to get to the nearest stars in our own Milky Way galaxy; but if you were to go to this hole and enter one side, you'd have to travel for a billion years before you would get to the other side," he told BBC News.........snip!

 

The void is roughly 6-10 billion light-years away and takes a sizeable chunk out of the visible Universe in its direction.

 

The team used data from the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory's VLA Sky Survey (NVSS) to make its discovery. The VLA - which stands for Very Large Array - is a collection of 27 radio telescopes in New Mexico.........snip!

 

The explanation for this may lie in the enigmatic "dark energy" that scientists know so little about but which is said to be accelerating the expansion of the Universe.

 

"In essence, this latest study gives us a very elegant demonstration of the existence of dark energy in a way which is very convincing," commented Professor Carlos Frenk, the director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University, UK.

 

 

Update:

 

While the website WNN (WorldNewsNetwork) claims the following:

 

The void, which is nearly a billion light years across, is empty of both normal matter and dark matter.

 

Upon closer examination other scientists have detected what appear to be about a half dozen "man-sized" safes in one corner of the billion light years wide void. Closer inspection yet shows that one of the large man safes contains something which seems to be either a mechanical device or a life form (or some combination of the two) that looks like the object in the illustration to the left.

 

So science may be on the verge of solving TWO mysteries. First they may have discovered the "dark matter" that is the source of the "dark energy" AND simultaneously perhaps stumbled onto the secret and "undisclosed" location where Dick Cheney stores the control panel with the joysticks that operate the whole world.

Ain't Science Great?

 

Remember kids, whatever you do..........