What Is The Biggest Thing In The Universe?

What is the largest

thing

in the

universe

? In 1985 cosmologists believed they had found the answer. A team led by John Hucker of the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics at Harvard had just completed a study of thousands of galaxies in the direction of the Koma Barones constellation, but as they examined the results and noticed some

thing

strange that stretched across hundreds of millions of light years. A shape slowly began to appear. The shape of a person, a stick man, but the creature with a long, thin torso, outstretched arms and dancing legs, was not a monster from an ancient legend.

It was one of our first glimpses of a supercluster and it wasn't the only one, our observable

universe

turned out to be full of superclusters, about 10 million in total, each containing tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of galaxies, in fact, our own Milky Way is nestled inside it. of one known as lanaka at one of its outer extremities and these superclusters are massive in their smallest form, being several hundred million light years long and composed of intertwined branches and clusters of galaxies, the largest stretch across the heavens up to 10 billion light years and its enormous volume is comparable only to its mass. a typical supercluster can contain more than 10 million trillion suns worth of material.

The nearest superclusters are named simply by the constellation through which we have to look to map them the comma the Virgo the Hydra Centaur the Indian Turkey plus the distant ones generally receive simple catalog designations unless they break some record in size or distance For example, the King Gora supercluster, one of the most massive so far mapped, was discovered in 2022 by a team of Japanese scientists who named it after Godzilla's three-headed nemesis, but despite the monstrous size of these Super clusters, their ability to span hundreds of thousands of galaxies at once, just as they span light years with chains of dazzling dots, are small because there is a much larger, much more threatening kind of entity inhabiting our planet.

Cosmos, the true largest objects in the United Nations Universe, are nothing, they are neither titans of ancient myths nor kaijus of modern cinema, but quite the opposite, the shadow in the darkness, for most of our universe it is empty nothingness, there are no lights that trace its structure, there are no gaseous filaments. to highlight their nature, we can only detect them through their absence cosmic voids are the largest objects in the Universe, they define superclusters, they define our existence, everything we know and love, our solar system, our galaxy, our supercluster, everything exists suspended on the edge. of the abyss and are the final destination of everything in the universe.

The first simulations of the Universe run on computers were in the 1960s. The body simulations were not capable of simulating around 100 bodies at a time, a far cry from the recent simulation of the Flamingo Universe with 300 billion elements and It is certainly not powerful enough to run Opera, our current sponsor, the faster, safer and smarter option than any of the default browsers out there. Opera has a great intuitive design with things like Arya, a next-generation generative AI created in collaboration with Open AI. easy to access and offers options to explain, explore and translate any highlighted text on a page - very useful when you are looking at physics papers.

It also has built-in messaging systems for WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and more, a free built-in VPN and ad blocker, and most importantly for me. A great little tab Islands when I've gone down a rabbit hole about a scientific theory. I want to have many books or online documents open at once. It's an efficient and secure browser option that 1960s scientists would have loved to get their hands on. So click the link in the description below to download oppra, it's free and you won't be disappointed thanks to oppra for supporting educational content on YouTube. The year was 1978 and astronomers Le Thompson and Steven Gregory had set themselves a grueling task to stay awake.

All night for almost a week at the Kit Peak Observatory located southeast of Tucson, Arizona, they were painstakingly recording the positions of dozens of galaxies. After confirming the positions of these galaxies in the sky, they then fed the light into their telescope. Amplified, the precursor of the modern digital camera, this technology allowed them to access exceptionally dark and distant galaxies beyond the range they could normally reach, they were looking further into the universe than any astronomer before. Once amplified, they then pass the light. from the galaxy to a spectrometer and from there Thompson and Gregory could measure the redshift of galaxies using that to calculate the distance there were no computers or sophisticated algorithms no indication Thompson and Gregory were conducting a study of galaxies by manually recording their positions and distances, of course, were not the first to perform such a task.

Astronomers had been carefully mapping the positions of galaxies for decades, but Thomson and Gregory had two tricks up their sleeves, two techniques that had not previously been applied to cosmology, one was the use of light amplification, but their second trick . It wasn't something of technology or theory or even deep knowledge, it was a plot, a method of showing the positions of their newly discovered galaxies. The plot looked like a slice of pizza that placed the Earth at the pointed apex and expanded outward as the distances from the Earth increased. grew although the idea may not seem important it was revolutionary because it allowed Thompson and Gregory to put the large scales of the universe in context by condensing the information into an easily digestible format the plan for their study was to map the galaxies in and around the known cluster coma for decades as a galaxy densification, they hope to use their results to find differences between galaxies that were members of the cluster and those that were in the field.

The random scattering of galaxies that were thought to be scattered throughout the universe, but instead they found something else: a vast empty region, devoid of galaxies, an area millions of light years wide that should have been full of galaxies but that it was not a floor in the cosmos. The new technique for plotting galaxy positions made it too obvious to ignore a dense one. A collection of black dots represents the coma cluster, a handful of dots here and there surrounding it and nothing in between, which is why they gave this blank space a name: a void.

When Thompson and Gregory published their work, the The astronomical community was skeptical and sometimes openly hostile. We already took the measurement of the heavens, they argued, and the galaxies inhabited the entire cosmos. The pair of astronomers had clearly made a mistake. Perhaps they had some defect in the design of their study or perhaps their eyes were simply deceiving them, that they wanted to see a void where they did not. had been driven by his desire to make a dramatic discovery regardless of nature. ABS a vacuum and the vacuum they discovered should not and could not exist, but that was in Europe and America just a few months after Thompson and Gregory. published their results a trio of Estonian and Soviet astronomers and theorists published the results of their own study in a different direction of the sky, although their study did not use the pizza-shaped diagram, they noted the existence of large holes in the distribution of galaxies and in addition to this, in contrast to the Western view of cosmology, Soviet scientists had been deliberately searching for such structures in the West, the dominant paradigm of the large-scale structure of the universe simply could not admit the existence of gaps.

Cosmological theory held that the Universe was homogeneous, meaning that on average it was more or less the same from place to place on sufficiently large scales. The particular pattern of galaxies might be different here and there, but statistically everything was the same. Astronomers had known about the existence of clusters for some time but these were simply denser than average clumps in an otherwise random distribution of galaxies, to Americans and Europeans the gaps just didn't fit, but Estonian and Soviet astronomers They had a different vision in the USSR, the great theorist Yakov Zeldovich had developed a completely different proposal for the evolution of the structure. in the universe, hypothesizing that large collections of material fracture and splinter over time forming smaller and smaller groups such as clusters and then galaxies, the voids in this image appear naturally as a consequence of this continuous fragmentation of the cosmos, so It was not until 1981 when American astronomer Robert Kersner led another study in a completely different direction of the sky, whereupon the Western astronomical community began to accept the reality of the V vacuum.

Kers and his colleagues found

what

is now known as the Booti void, which still remains one of the largest known. voids in existence the Botti void was larger than any galaxy larger than any cluster larger than anything in the study volume the botti void was the largest single object in existence a vast expanse of void dominating the heavens along with the coma vacuum that discovered the original vacuum of Thompson and Gregory became known when astronomers were forced to accept their existence, but this raised big questions, first of all, very simply, how vacuums could exist and More importantly, how could a homogeneous universe allow for such a defect.

This was the birth of the studio. of the large-scale structure of the universe and the discovery of the first voids marked the beginning of our understanding of the true extent of our Cosmos, the universe was not as cosmologists had previously suspected, an endless series of galaxies occasionally grouped in clusters, but which was much more elegant. The Clusters were there but they were nothing more than dense kns nodes trapped in the tangle of long, thin filaments of galaxies between them hung gigantic sheets of galaxy walls beyond the scale of human imagination and eclipsing them all were the voids the expanses of the nothingness that at first challenged but later defined the large-scale structure of the universe but, of course, these gaps demanded an explanation.

What became increasingly clear in the 1980s and 1990s was that the Universe could still be homogeneous, but only on truly enormous scales; clusters did not represent the end of greatness, or even the end of greatness. Completely dwarfing them, the smaller cosmic voids defined and delineated a much vaster structure that subsumed the entire observable universe, and mapping that larger structure, the voids and clusters together, led to an even greater challenge in finding an explanation for its existence as cosmologists worked, they would discover the void later. void and with each new generation of studies they would find vast expanses of void that would rival and even surpass the greatness of the bootes and coma voids and each time they would find a new gigantic cosmic void they would be forced to wonder if this was really the end.

Would homogeneity be found on a scale where the universe was the same everywhere? We don't know who made the Lenux globe, but we do know when it was built in 1510, less than two decades after Columbus made contact between the old and new worlds. approximately accurate coastlines for Europe, Africa and Asia, although the proportions are greatly distorted by modern standards. South America is present, although only its southern half. North America is a series of large islands and there is no trace of Australia or Antarctica except along the eastern coast of Asia. which at the time was known in part through second-hand accounts from sailors is written with the Latin phrase ik dracones here be dragons the globe is one of only two known maps that actually contain the phrase, but the sentiment reached everywhere in medieval cartography at the time when the world was just beginning to open to the trade of discovery and the geographers of the Conquest were learning more and more about the structure of the world with each voyage, but for each measurement and study of a coast or location of a city, much remained unknown and that is why these first cartographers faced off. a difficult decision,

what

should they put in those blank spaces? the answer was simple.

Fantastic illustrations of dragons, snakes, lions and other dangerous creatures to create a sense of wonder and mystery of the unknown lands of the world and to warn the viewer that Beyond the Lights of Civilization contains hidden dangers, but that sense of lurking danger of the unknown in the dark did not die with the map makers of theAge of Exploration. As astronomers continued to drill deeper into the heavens, they would also find empty spots and limits of their knowledge on our maps. of the local universe begin with the known, the so-called safe our solar system, a single star surrounded by eight planets and countless smaller objects, is just one of the hundreds of billions that inhabit our home, the Milky Way, this galaxy with His arms serenely spiral and his dense Cor four. spans 100,000 Li-years in diameter, although it is less than 30,000 Li-years thick compared to that, even the largest possible extent of our solar system is on the same scale as a single microscopic cell compared to an entire human body at approximately 2 and a half million light.

Years away from us is our nearest neighbor galaxy, Andromeda, which contains up to a trillion individual stars that also shine brightly in a beautiful spiral pattern, along with the triangle and a number of other dwarf galaxies, we make up the group local. It's a rather uncreative name, but it's fitting that it's a small group of galaxies bound together through their mutual gravitational attraction, whatever fate befalls the universe, we'll remain side by side, the next most important cosmological object. Close to us is a specifically Virgo cluster, named after the constellation through which you must look. Look at it Clusters are the gravitationally largest objects in the cosmos They are dense cities that house a thousand or more galaxies sometimes spanning millions of liters in diameter The Virgo cluster is located approximately 65 million light years from us and it is at these scales that Actually getting into cosmological considerations, the Virgo cluster is the centerpiece of what is known as a supercluster, the largest glomeration of matter in the entire universe, although they are not yet gravitationally bound, meaning that the mutual self-gravity of all galaxies within them has not completely united them.

Superclusters are still forming the name of our local supercluster: Virgo supercluster, which is an unfortunate duplicate astronomical terminology: Virgo. The cluster beats at the heart of the Virgo supercluster, which hosts dozens of clusters like our local cluster; However, more recently, astronomers have discovered that the Virgo supercluster is just one branch of an even larger supercluster called lania, taken from the Hawaiian word for Vast Sky, the name is appropriate because lanaka contains four branches, each of They are large enough to count as a supercluster in their own right, up to 500 individual groups and clusters and more than 100,000 individual galaxies, all forming a tangled branch that reaches a mass stretching over 500 million light. years, the scale of lanaka compared to a single galaxy is about the same as the scale of a city compared to a person, but considering that each galaxy has tens, if not hundreds, of billions of individual stars, it can be consider lanaka as a truly large metropolis, the equivalent. of an immense city that houses billions of people, its number of stars is approximately equivalent to the number of ants that inhabit the Earth and Lania is not alone beyond our supercluster of origin, there is even more the supercluster of Hercules, the Shapley supercluster, the Perseus Pisces, beyond that, the large number of known superclusters exceed our ability to give them individual names, so they are known simply as numerical ENT trees in a computer catalog, records of their position in space and lists their member galaxies, together all the interconnected superclusters create the cosmic web, the largest structure in the world.

The entire universe, every corner of the observable Cosmos with a diameter of 95 billion light years, is filled with this series of superclusters connected to a network of superclusters that traverse the known universe, where tangled branches meet massive clusters like Virgo. They appear with long, thin filaments extending between them. them and Wide walls separating entire portions of the cosmos the size of the cosmic web is almost impossible to describe by analogy. You could say that galaxies are compared to the cosmic web in the same way that individual cells are compared to the human body, but for this.

To really work, our cells would have to be a million times smaller than they actually are. The cosmic web is simply so vast, so large that individual galaxies appear to be nothing more than tiny points of light. Each galaxy is home to hundreds of billions of stretched-out individual stars. Spanning 100,000 light years, but as dazzling and understandably vast as these superclusters are, they are almost inconsequential to the grand tapestry of our universe. Instead, by volume, the cosmos is almost completely empty. All galaxies, except those buried deep in the hearts of clusters. they live constantly on the edge, never far from the vast gulfs of relative nothingness that consume the universe, and therefore in this sense the name Cosmic Web is appropriate, just as the threads of a spider's web also attract attention, but hardly any.

They take up space. The light of one galaxy after another illuminates the filaments and clusters and yet they are dwarfed by nothingness. Astronomers find it difficult to map the voids closest to us, as they are so large and empty that they require extensive extensive surveys to reveal them. them, but we do know that the void closest to the Milky Way is the local void which alone is almost 200 million light years in diameter. Beyond that we have the northern and southern voids, the giant void, and the bootes and coma voids. Studies continue to delve deeper into the universe.

There are even more irregularly arranged empty spaces between the superclusters, and yet, despite their names, each void is not perfectly empty. They are certainly galaxies, as early astronomers discovered to their astonishment, but there are countless microscopic objects floating around. throughout the cosmos fragments of hydrogen and helium, cosmic rays and neutrinos exploding here and there and the ever-present cosmic microwave background radiation, but the density of matter within a vacuum is definitely extremely low. Cosmologists typically define a cosmic void as any region of the universe. with a density less than 20% of the cosmic average and considering that the cosmic average is approximately one hydrogen atom per cubic meter of space, that is very low;

In contrast, a galaxy will have at least millions of times greater density than the cosmic average, so this means that deep in the hearts of voids, aside from the occasional stray hydrogen atom or passing cosmic ray, you can find yourself millions of light years from any significant structure. Galaxy or even star. They are, by far, the loneliest places in the universe. In fact, these voids are not only empty of matter, but they are also just as empty of Dark Matter. Dark Matter constitutes more than 80% of the mass of almost all galaxies and clusters in the cosmos, although it is completely invisible and is formed by some particle unknown to modern physics and This domain of Dark Matter extends to the filaments and walls of the cosmic network itself.

What we see in galaxies are just bright beacons on a dark, distant shore that give us faint glimpses of the true underlying structures, which is why the cosmic web is made of dark matter. dark matter and, in turn, the cosmic voids are empty of Dark Matter, although we cannot directly observe the distribution of dark matter in observations because we are limited to observing light-emitting galaxies, we can see the full glory of the cosmic web of Dark Matter in cosmological simulations. The densest concentrations of Dark Matter correspond to the appearance of clusters, while the threads of Dark Matter contain filaments of galaxies and where there is no Dark Matter in the depths of the greatest cosmic void there are no galaxies either.

Galaxy surveys such as the Sloan Sky digital survey have discovered dozens of There are thousands of gaps in the universe and even that represents only a small fraction of the observable Cosmos. The smallest voids are about 20 million light-years across, and astronomers find them embedded within much larger clumps of matter. Relatively small void pockets buried within superclusters, while the largest voids stretch across significant fractions of the known universe, separating their boundary superclusters by a billion light years and more, and it is in these enormous voids that we find the Beginning of a potential problem: The voids are large and empty, which was a surprise to early astronomers, but we now know how they formed, along with the brightly illuminated superclusters, over billions of years of cosmic history, but some observations suggest that the largest gaps may be too large to break our understanding of cosmology. they should not belong to the universe these are the so-called super voids the entrance was in the lower corner of a sinkhole completely covered from above stumbled upon completely by accident the cave was discovered by a local Vietnamese logger who was looking for wood near the Lao border heard the sound From the rushing water, his curiosity drew him towards the entrance, it was Pitch Black, but judging by the feeling of the air I thought he was walking into a huge space, the strong wind that was blowing felt like something from the underworld, he returned home forgetting about the The exact location of the entrance was not found again until 20 years later, in 2008, the following year.

HOH Hine guided the British Cave Research Association into the cave and undertook multiple expeditions over the years. The full extent of the system was finally revealed, spanning almost 10 years. Kilm, the cave called Sun dong, which roughly translates to this mountain river cave, is the largest in the world, it even has its own ecosystem and climate and spent millions of years hidden in plain sight undisturbed, our world is full of hidden wonders, lingering empty spaces. undiscovered right under our feet and above our heads so what else are we missing in the universe? What caves, what empty spaces lurk in the vast reaches of the cosmos and what do these cosmic caves teach us? the voids and supervoids that exist between the great structures of the universe and we have only begun to explore their terrible depths, but despite their enormous dominant size in the Universe, these voids have not always been so large, like their counterparts, the walls, filaments and clumps, voids began their lives as subatomic fluctuations in the quantum foam that permeates all of space and time, these fluctuations briefly frozen in place during the tumultuous era of inflation.

That hypothetical event, which cosmologists suspect occurred long before our universe was even a second old, increased the size of the cosmos by multiple orders of magnitude. In the process, subatomic variations in space-time expanded dramatically into very small variations in space-time, but what came next is due to gravity. These small pockets of curved spacetime had a slightly stronger gravitational pull that allowed matter to start accumulating in them as matter accumulated in those clumps. They had an even stronger gravitational pull which in turn increases their ability to attract even more matter from their surroundings, like a cave that begins as a small stream of water that opens a gap in the crust over the next hundreds of millions of years. , the slow but persistent machinations of the gravitational force would begin the process of building the cosmic web the first stars gathering towards the light the first galaxies the first galaxies gathering in the first groups the beginnings of the thin tendrils of filaments that connected them sending more material funneling into the initial massive clusters, but in our universe, as the rich get richer, the poor get poorer as matter continues to accumulate in galaxies and clumps and clusters, it had to come from somewhere. part and came from voids that began their lives as a part by millions of depressions in density barely perceptible from anywhere else in the universe the voids emptied and enlarged compared to the massive structures that were built from violent collisions and furious fusions The first voids led quiet, placid lives simply pulled larger matter out of them and into their surroundings, at first slowly and then at a faster rate as the gravitational pull of the cosmic web grew over the same hundreds of millions of years. that saw the emergence of the first stars and galaxies, the first voids also appeared intandem starting as Tiny Forgotten Pockets and steadily increased their volume until they quickly dominated the cosmic web.

Voids occasionally merge just as galaxies and clusters do, but when voids do merge it's a much less violent affair. If a galaxy wall separates two voids, for example, then over time the galaxies become matter. that wall slowly disperse and head to the dense clumps at the perimeter of the wall, when enough material leaves the wall, the two voids become a single larger entity, there is no titanic collision, there is no great release of energy , just the inexorable expansion of nothing. This kind of flexibility made it difficult for cosmologists to precisely define a vacuum, but they have recently found a unique solution.

One inspired by a completely different field of geography study. Geographers often want to identify the sources and flows of water in a land mass, discovering the path of water Helps understand ecosystems map and mitigate the effects of pollution and measure the availability of groundwater for drinking irrigation and industry to To do this, geographers create a map known as a watershed. A watershed is a region where all water flows toward the same destination. Watersheds are generally divided by high topographic features such as mountains and ridges. If you imagine pouring rainwater over the continental United States, for example, you will find some water flowing into the Pacific and some water flowing into the Atlantic.

The Rocky Mountains serve as the ridge line. between these two different walled dividing basin regions, so if we imagine the high-density regions of the universe, like walls and filaments, as high-peaked mountains and the low-density voids as the valleys between them, we can realize a kind of similar analysis if we imagine that it pours water. throughout the Universe allowing water to run from the heights of the filaments and walls towards the valleys of the voids. This Cuenca technique provides cosmologists with a clear and cohesive definition of an oid. They are simply the low-density regions of the universe defined by the environment.

Topology, like watersheds on a land mass, is defined by the peaks and ridges of the mountains that surround them and determines where water flows. Using this technique, cosmologists have been able to leverage existing galaxy surveys, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Dark Energy Survey, for mapping. and catalog tens of thousands of individual voids in the nearby universe, and in those studies cosmologists have begun to identify a hierarchy of voids. The largest voids in the universe are not completely empty, but contain small collections of faint red galaxies, and those galaxies are not scattered. around randomly within the voids, further analysis has revealed that these galaxies, as faint as they are, are organized into a miniature cosmic web with small clumps and thin, wispy filaments and, between those wispy filaments, there are voids themselves. themselves located within the volume of the largest voids.

Imagine a gigantic cave system with a main chamber leading to smaller empty spaces divided by thin rock walls, that's what cosmologists are finding in the cosmic web. Analysis of voids in cosmic web simulations reveals even deeper EV levels with susubub voids located within them. of subvoids nested within voids, in fact the structure of voids in the universe is fractal as in nature with the same cosmic web structure appearing again and again from smaller to larger scales; However, we cannot directly observe all the levels of this nested hierarchy because the cosmic network exists mainly in dark matter and only a part of it is illuminated with galaxies, but where does that very easy hierarchy end? are the largest voids known as the boot void the largest possible voids that exist or are mere subvoids of even larger expanses of vacuum supervoids an indication of the existence of supervoids comes from an unexpected source the cosmic microwave background or CMB The CMB is the leftover light generated when our universe was only 380,000 years old.

At that time the universe was a million times smaller than it is today and had an average temperature of around 10,000 Kelvin forcing all matter in the cosmos to a high density, high temperature plasma state as the universe expanded from that state the plasma cooled becoming a neutral gas and the first atoms appeared this process also made the universe transparent to radiation and that radiation flooded into Young. The cosmos persists to this day as a bath of low-energy microwave radiation. The CMB is not perfectly uniform as it contains one part in a million temperature variations. Cooler and warmer spots of various sizes.

Cosmologists understand the statistics of these points, both in their size and size. its temperature and use them to obtain an enormous amount of information about the state of the young universe, except for one known simply as the cold spot, a particular region of the CMB is exceptionally large and exceptionally cold, in fact, it is so large and so cold that the standard cosmological models could not explain it, it is an anomaly; To date there is no widely accepted explanation for this cold spot and theories range from radical changes in our cosmological models to the tantalizing possibility that the cold spot is the intersection point of our universe with Another, but most likely, explanation, It's that when we look at the cold spot we're really just looking at a vast, shallow combination of voids.

A super emptiness. The super vacuum may affect our view of the WBC due to the fact that it has not always been this way. here it took time for the supervoid to evolve out of the primordial cosmic web when the light from the CMB first entered the supervoid a long time ago, it was relatively small and shallow, but the supervoid is so large that it took hundreds of millions and even thousands Of millions of years to cross at that time, the super vacuum widened and deepened, so when the light finally came out the other end, it had to overcome a much deeper gravitational well than when it entered.

This depleted energy of cmbb light resulting in a cold spot in that direction and the cold spot supervoid, also known as the aridus supervoid, is not just another supervoid, the cares vatz supervoid, also known simply as the giant void, is located a More than 1.2 billion light years away, but stretching across With a huge diameter of 1.3 billion Li, but the largest of them all, in 2013 a trio of researchers Ryan Keenan, Amy Barger and Lennox Cowi proposed the existence of a truly enormous supervoid, this void occasionally known as the KBC void after its discoverers or the great pole would be the largest void ever known, potentially up to 3 billion light years in diameter.

Furthermore, despite all the large structures surrounding the Milky Way, such as the Lanaka and Shapley superclusters, this supervoid would contain them all with its volumes so large that it could contain them. structures and still have a low enough average density to be called a vacuum, the trio of astronomers proposed the existence of this super vacuum to help explain discrepancies in the measurement of the Hubble constant, which is the current expansion rate. of the universe. of the early Universe like the CMB differ from measurements taken in the modern Universe like Supernovas since the interiors of voids and supervoids have different expansion rates.

The KBC void with its enormous volume around us could explain the difference, however , the existence of the KBC vacuum remains highly controversial as astronomers have found no additional independent evidence for its existence, regardless of the existence of the disputed KBC vacuum, the other known supervoids extend, if not completely break, our understanding of cosmology like a cave that could never have formed on geological time scales. Given our knowledge of cave formation processes, the problem is that the voids may simply be too large. We understand the scale at which the universe becomes homogeneous as a product of gravity and time.

We know what the early Universe was like because we have very detailed maps of its size. of matter fluctuations thanks to our observations of the CMB, from there we can leverage our understanding of how gravity and the fundamental components of the universe work to trace the resulting evolution of the cosmic web, and the results of those calculations tell us that if we do zoomed in at scales of 300 million light years, the universe should be more or less the same from place to place; In other words, a 300 million light-year portion of the universe should be the same, at least in a statistical sense, as any other 300 million light-year portion to get a better idea of ​​what homogeneity means in this context.

Let's imagine taking a square piece of land and measuring how many people live within that piece. Obviously people are not distributed homogeneously throughout the Earth; There are far more people crammed into dense cities and far fewer in rural outskirts. almost no one in the deserts, if your area is too small, say 100 km wide, then your areas will be very different, some will capture nothing but inhospitable deserts or mountain ranges, while others may focus on bustling cities, but if you do its area large enough, then all areas at least some cities will have many rural areas and large areas of uninhabited regions, which is the homogeneous scale where each patch has approximately the same average population and therefore the presence of voids Largest ones potentially threaten our understanding of cosmology because they are like vast deserts that extend beyond even our largest plausible patch, the largest supervoids are larger than a supposed scale where the universe should become homogeneous, so the The question is whether these supervoids are simply randomly large due to a pure cosmic accident and do not otherwise affect our understanding of homogeneity.

Or are they so big that we need to revise our understanding of how large structures appear and grow in the cosmos? If a cave on Earth is too big and too deep, it begins to threaten our understanding of geology. There is no firm answer within the cosmological community to this question, some cosmologists argue that the known supervoids are too large and violate our current understanding of homogeneity and therefore force us to reconsider our cosmological models, perhaps a new fifth force of nature or some new element in the cosmos explains how supervoids have become so massive, but at the same time other cosmologists argue that we should expect occasional supervoids even in our close portion of the universe, based on results from extremely computer simulations. complexities of the growth of the structure, while this debate has no solution.

One thing is clear: the voids have not stopped growing, they emerged billions of years ago as small low-density pockets embedded in a sea of ​​matter and have grown to their current scale, where they dominate the volume of the universe and for the next few years billions of years. They will come to destroy the cosmic web and leave nothing but Darkness. There are many dangers lurking in the cosmos. Many processes whose only desire is to grow, expand and consume simple diseases such as viruses and bacteria, their growth is limited by the available resources. in the biosphere and competition with other organisms, but on the largest scales there is nothing that can stand in the way of consuming multiplication.

Cosmic voids are more than just empty holes in the distribution of matter in the universe; They were once much smaller than they are today, they have not finished growing and in a strange trick of physics there is nothing that can stop them we live in an expanding universe with each passing day our cosmos grows more and more another way of saying That is to say that the average distance between galaxies grows over time, there may be occasional mergers here and there, for example, the Milky Way will merge with Andromeda in about 5 billion years, but at sufficiently large scales this expansion becomes evident and at a In the late 1990s astronomers discovered that this expansion is accelerating the expansion of the universe is getting faster and faster every day, even to this day no one knows for sure what is causing this accelerated expansion, but it has a name appropriately mysterious: dark energy in the simplest and most direct models of what Dark Energy could be.

Physicists treat it as a fundamental aspect of the vacuum of space-time. This means that if you were to take a box and empty out all the particles and radiationleaving a perfectly empty volume, you would still have a box full of dark energy. Dark energy has an extremely weak repulsive gravitational effect, meaning we cannot notice its effects where there are large concentrations of mass such as galaxies and clusters, but on average across the universe it becomes dominant, accelerating the expansion of the universe and This means that there is only one place in the universe where Dark Energy dominates the cosmic voids.

The deep depths of the vast void that define the nature of these voids means that they are not truly empty; in fact, they are devoid of matter and radiation, but are filled to the brim. With dark energy, a disease that is infecting the universe, it is within the voids, not in galaxies, nor in filaments, nor in clusters, where the expansion of the universe is accelerating and the cosmic voids are not expanding gently as matter builds up around their edges due to dark energy they are literally pushing their boundaries moving more and more matter away from their centers they are pressing the walls between them thinning them they are squeezing the filaments breaking them and this when it won't stop in fact will get worse As the universe expands and voids grow, there will be even more dark energy in the universe, allowing dark energy to become more powerful.

Dark energy began to dominate the evolution of the universe about 5 billion years ago, it was in that era that the earth's history of the formation of structures in the cosmos from the humble seeds planted in the first chaotic moments of inflation to the spin of the greatest structures in the universe began to come to an end - a subtle symptom that something was deeply sick in the cosmos - this means that the great superclusters that stretch, coil and twist for hundreds of millions of light years will never truly come together. ; the voids around them will crush them to death, breaking the tenuous links between the clusters and moving all matter as far away from itself as possible.

Only in a few billion years will the cosmic web be destroyed and consumed by the ever-growing voids within it, no more filaments, no more superclusters, no more walls, just isolated groups and clusters separated by a vast and ever greater expanse of absolute nothingness of emptiness, the distant future of the universe belongs to the void they will win they will leave nothing behind as they lay waste to the universe but in an ironic twist the voids are humanity's most crystalline windows into the deepest layers of the In the past, when cosmologists try to understand the universe they only have two options.

One option is to look for direct observation evidence from specific epochs such as the cosmic microbackground, but the CMB is fundamentally limited, it was a singular event that occurred only once briefly in the entire history of the universe. cosmos and therefore only carries with it certain information. while the other option cosmologists have is to observe as much of the modern universe as possible, build maps of the distribution of galaxy groups, clusters and voids, and use those maps combined with our knowledge of physics to rewind the clock and try to learn what the universe is like. is made of the contents of the universe the amount of normal matter dark matter and dark energy determine how the cosmic web evolves, a universe with much higher intensities of dark energy, for example, would never have formed a cosmic web in the first place, while A universe with very little dark matter would have formed only faint, weak galaxies The history of the entire history of the universe is written in the cosmic web A vast trove of data that can tell us what the universe is made of and how it evolved over billions of years years and what their final fate will be, but the cosmic web is enormously complex in principle, we can rewind the evolution of each cluster and each galaxy to the primordial soup of hydrogen and helium of years ago, after all, it is just a bunch of particles They interact with each other through the fundamental laws of physics, but in practice this is almost impossible, for example, your body contains trillions and trillions of hydrogen atoms.

These hydrogen atoms have inhabited the cosmos for more than 13 billion years. The properties of those same hydrogen atoms. Their positions. Their speeds. Particular combinations and arrangements within your body contain some faint memory of the universe as it was billions of years ago, but discovering those early conditions by examining your body would involve discovering every interaction in which those hydrogen atoms participated during all those billions of years. of years. years, so although there is an echo of the early Universe still inhabiting its body, it is almost impossible to find it and the same applies to entire galaxies and clusters, they are so complex that they are so busy with magnetic fields in the form of stars, cosmic rays supern noi and all kinds of physics so complex that we can never hope to unravel the primordial conditions of the universe by observing them, but voids are simple, voids are empty, voids are clean, voids are boring, they have hardly changed in billions of years of cosmic history, although they have grown and occasionally merged with their neighbors.

All these processes are slow. Careful. Deliberates the voids are therefore relatively unevolved when it comes to large cosmic objects. They provide the perfect window to the early Universe. If you want to know what the cosmos was like billions of years ago, you can look into the voids, and because the voids are filled with dark energy. They also contain deep within them the definitive answers to that perplexing mystery. Although dark energy is believed to flood every cubic crest of space-time, it is impossible to define its nature within dense regions such as solar systems, galaxies and clusters, simply There are too many other things and everything. the associated complex dynamics that go along with that to discover how dark energy works, but not in voids, voids are full of dark energy, they are laboratories where cosmologists can go to study the deeper workings of the dark side of the cosmos, etc decades Cosmic voids have languished in the shadows, a forgotten and ignored byproduct of traditional studies of the universe's bright objects.

Its initial discovery was even ridiculed and mocked because cosmologists did not believe that the Universe could create such vast regions of absolutely nothing but interesting cosmic voids have been exploited in the last decade thanks to new techniques such as Watershed to reliably find them in galaxy studies. And now that those studies are broad enough, cosmologists have more than a handful of gaps to study, they have thousands to catalog. The European Space Agency's Uclid Telescope, launched in 2023, will carry out a massive survey that will map the positions of millions of galaxies where the study of voids was once on the fringes of cosmology.

The uid research team now includes a group dedicated to finding cosmic gaps within the study and using to understand dark matter and dark energy. The same goes for NASA's next flagship mission, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, which also has a working group dedicated to its study, so with each passing year the universe seems to be teaching us something important about nature. of gaps, if we want to understand the deepest Mysteries of the cosmos, test the limits of our theories and find intelligent ways to overcome them towards a new understanding of physics, we must learn to stare into the deep Abyss that you have been staring at all along. story of the universe don't forget to like, subscribe and leave us a comment to tell us what you think, thanks for watching and see you next time.