Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic A hole in the universe? Oh no! Get the superglue!

Just came across this article from AOL. The text is taken directly from the AP, but the difference is that AOL added some neat space pictures.

Basically, they've been looking around at different things with the Hubble Telescope. A few years back, one crazy guy randomly decided to use his extremely rare and valuable time (one telescope for everyone to share...) to look at a blank spot where there were no visible stars. Brilliant. Waste your chance staring off into the blackness of space.

Here's (a sample of) what he saw:

[img]http://www.aolcdn.com/aolnews_photos/0d/03/20070825195009990001[/img]

By looking between the visible stars of our galaxy, he managed to see out into the wider universe... Where there are as many galaxies full of billions of stars as there are stars that you can see in our night sky. (Each of those specks of light is an entire galaxy, and the whole picture is of a tiny patch of what otherwise looks like blackness even to our best ground-based telescopes.)

Since then, other people have used their time to investigate other patches of blackness... and they've generally seen more of the same: vistas full of an unimaginable number of galaxies, floating out in the space far beyond the edges of our own little galaxy.

But now they've stumbled on to something else... A huge patch of utter blackness. A gigantic void, far bigger than anything ever expected.

No telling what it means just yet. The article mentions that holes are usually the result of gravitational forces from larger bodies pulling the smaller objects away, leaving emptiness behind. But that's an unthinkably huge area to have been so cleared.

I suppose if it was something as simple as a black hole blocking our view, they'd have figured that out.

I wonder if they've actually managed to get a glimpse of the edge of the universe - the great cosmic void beyond the range where matter has managed to drift. If such a thing exists in the first place.

Or I suppose it could be the opposite - a look inward to an area so old that all the stars have died out.

Or maybe it's the patch where a certain giant guy in purple space armor has recently been snacking.

In any case... intriguing. And another small piece in the great puzzle of the universe.

I know how this happened. See in Season 2 episode 6 the Blackhawk Satellite lazer thingy was going to destroy the base, but Superman pointed the lazer ray out into space. I think the ray he pointed into outerspace destroyed everything in it's path, thus you have a huge blank section of space.

LOL!

Astronomers say that the structure of the universe looks something like this:



The red filaments in this picture corresponds to concentrations of matter (i.e., a lot of galaxies). Bright point-like sources correspond to very massive clusters of galaxies. Dark bubble-like areas are "voids", areas where there is little matter and very few galaxies.

Astronomers are confident that galaxies tend to cluster. You can actually see that in the image that Paul posted. Look at the upper left corner of the picture. You should be able to see at least seven blue-white dots in a nice straight line. Those dots are almost certainly galaxies that belong together, and which are all situated at more or less the same distance from us (really far away). Now look at the area at the top of the image. There are a number of galaxies there that look very slightly brighter than the galaxies on the upper left. These could belong to another "filament of galaxies", but they could also belong to the same filament as the ones on the upper left.

To the upper right there are four whitish galaxies, much brighter than the ones on the upper left. These four relatively bright galaxies undoubtedly belong together, and they are much closer than the faint ones on the upper left. The two or three white galaxies to the right of the big central yellow galaxy probably belong to the same group as the four on the upper right. These relatively bright white galaxies make up another filament.

Once again, galaxies cluster together. They are attracted by their mutual gravity. But as galaxies pull on each other, creating concentrations of matter, they leave voids behind. The void that astronomers recently found is the biggest they've ever seen, but it is really just one void of very, very many.

Ann

There has to be some way for the angels to fall through to earth.