Space & Astronomy

Unexplained hole in the universe discovered

By T.K. Randall
April 21, 2015

Image Credit: (PD) NASA/ESA/ESO/Wolfram Freudling et al via Wikimedia Commons Discovered by Dr Istvan Szapudi and his team at the University of Hawaii, the mysterious region of space has come to be known as "the largest individual structure ever identified by humanity".

Consisting of an inconceivably large expanse of dark, cold space, this 'supervoid' covers a region of 1.8 billion light years across and is situated around 3 billion light years from the Earth. Its discovery may help to shed some light on the mysterious "Cold Spot" that exists in the universe's cosmic microwave background radiation.Dr Szapudi had spent the better part of eight years attempting to locate the anomalous void which has since been described as "too big" to fit in to our current understanding of the universe.

It is so enormous in fact that it covers a region large enough to house 10,000 galaxies.

What the void is, how it formed and exactly what is inside it continues to remain a mystery.

Source: BBC News

Tags: Supervoid, Space