23rd February 2020
By: Haris Ahmad[1]
On this very own rocky planet Earth, we humans have made many discoveries and have uncovered places in the universe that are billions of light-years away from us. Though there are many secrets yet to uncover, there are some mysteries that we still can’t solve. In this vast vacuum of space, exist billions of objects that may be very creepy and nerve-racking due to their strange features. However, among all these strange objects, the greatest mystery is the literal nothingness.
On this very own rocky planet Earth, we humans have made many discoveries and have uncovered places in the universe that are billions of light-years away from us. Though there are many secrets yet to uncover, there are some mysteries that we still can’t solve. In this vast vacuum of space, exist billions of objects that may be very creepy and nerve-racking due to their strange features. However, among all these strange objects, the greatest mystery is the literal nothingness.
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| Image Source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/331999803762953131/ |
It is the Boötes void. This is not just a small place; it is 350 million light-years in diameter. This makes it one of the biggest places in the universe. This creepy place has confused scientists from about 40 years but still, the scientists can’t find out how such a vast place of nothingness could even exist. In 1981, Robert Kirshner and his team were gazing at the universe for huge objects that were moving away from us due to the expansion of the universe but luckily, they found an empty place in the Boötes constellation approximately 700 million light-years away from us. Naturally, this place should contain approximately 10,000 galaxies and trillions of stars but it is just an empty place with nothing. After 40 years of research, they could only find 60 galaxies in this place.
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Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%C3%B6tes_void |
We have found many voids and understood how they can exist but the problem with Boötes void is that how can avoid such big be situation such perfectly centered between a huge array of stars and galaxies. A scientist named Greg stated that if Earth would’ve been in the center of the void, we wouldn’t have found out that there were more galaxies until the 1960s. The main question is that how did this void form. Now, we know that voids are formed all the time which doesn’t defy any law of science. However. for a void of the size of Boötes void, the universe should be a lot older than we know for such a phenomenon to happen naturally. This even caused doubts against the big bang theory.
There are some theories about this void with one being that some strange object in the void is pushing out dark energy throughout millions of light-years but as we don’t know much about dark energy, this theory is one that we are not much sure about yet. Some say that the galaxies all got into one point of singularity which may be a supermassive black hole but, this also remains a mystery because we don’t know much about the activity near black holes. Moreover, this theory also challenges the big bang as for the vast number of galaxies, moving into one spot would again suggest that the universe is older than we know.
Furthermore, one likely theory that maybe they are coming together due to attraction at their boundaries and merging; moreover, the 60 galaxies in the void seem to have weird, tube-like shapes which may be the biggest clue to this mystery. Due to attraction at their boundaries, the small voids are emerging into each other in a soap bubble kind of phenomenon. The tube-like shapes of the galaxies may be caused by the remains of boundaries between two bodies.
This void may remain a great mystery for the coming decades but soon, we will find out what is this and how it formed.
[1] Haris Ahmad is currently studying in 9th grade (O levels) in The City School Islamabad.
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