cenobitic-anchorite:

eliciaforever:

Space is so creepy and wonderful. Who the hell needs hell when there’s space.

Like there’s an old constellation called Eridanus that you can see in the southern sky, and its not a very interesting constellation. It’s a river. It’s actually the water that’s pouring out of Aquarius, so in the sky it’s kind of boring. It’s a path of stars.

But within Eridanus, in between the stars, there’s a place where the background radiation is unexplainably cold. Because after the Big Bang, there was all this light that scattered everywhere, and it’s the oldest light in the universe, but we can’t see it. It’s so dim that it only shows up as a glow of microwaves, so to us, it just looks like the blackness of the night.

But there’s this spot in Eridanus where that little glow of ancient microwaves isn’t what it should be. It’s cold and dark.

And it’s enormous. Like a billion light year across. Of mostly just emptiness. And we don’t know why. One theory is that it’s simply a huge void, like a place where there are no galaxies. Voids like that do exist. Most of them are smaller, but they’re a sort of predictable part of the structure of the universe. The cold spot in Eridanus, if it were a void, would be so enormous that it would change how we understand the universe. 

But another theory is that this cold spot is actually the place where a parallel universe is tangled with our own. 

Oh shit, now, the CMB Cold Spot is my jam.  Been doing reading on this for over a year now (two, maybe?  Sure as hell am not an expert) and the existence of the cold spot (and other such supervoids) is part of what is theorized to help prove certain theories about dark energy.  Even if the parallel universe theory goes out the window (oh and I so hope it doesn’t), it’s tied to a lot of heavy duty weirdness scientists are still trying to figure out.  The Eridanus Supervoid, as she says, is only one of the biggies out there - it’s not even THE biggest.  It’s just the biggest with the hypothesized ‘cold spot’ radiation where two universes might be rubbing up on each other.

The big sucker is currently in Canes Venatici, and they just threw up their hands and called it the Giant Void.  NBD, probably ‘Big Ass Motherfuckin’ Void’ didn’t look pro on the scholastic journals.

Supervoids are places where there seems to be nothing.  That’s not quite so unusual - under the Planck probe, we’ve got a universe that’s (checks wikipedia to make sure she’s got the numbers right) 26.8% dark matter (shit we barely understand), 68.3% dark energy (shit we understand almost as well, and if you chuck it through a fantasy blender you get Mass Effect biotic space magic), and less than FIVE PERCENT of ‘normal-ass matter’ in the whole universe.  Like planets and stars and whatever the fuck jeggings are made out of.  But what there is often strung together in a kind of cosmic web, linked by that dark matter we don’t quite get yet.  The supervoids are where the matter congregates the least - sometimes a few galaxies here and there, but it’s the universal equivalent of central Australia.  Abandon all hope, if ye spaceship runs out of gas here.

We’ve got the Local Void ‘next door,’ too.  No biggie.  It’s just a cool possible 150mil light years x 230mil of not much and is forcing us and other objects in the Local Sheet away from it at insane speeds.

(via rumine)