Astronomers are scratching their heads over a puzzling non-discovery, an enormous hole in the universe measuring nearly a billion light-years across. There really is nothing to the void, which is empty of both normal matter such as stars, galaxies, and gas, and the mysterious, unseen ‘dark matter’ that astronomers detect by its gravitational pull. While earlier studies have shown holes in the large-scale fabric of the cosmos, this new discovery dwarfs them all. advertisement ‘Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size,’ said Lawrence Rudnick of the University of Minnesota. ‘This is 1,000 times the volume of what we sort of expected to see in terms of a typical void,’ he said. ‘It’s not clear that we have the right word yet … This is too much of a surprise.’ Rudnick, along with Shea Brown and Liliya Williams, also of the University of Minnesota, reported their findings in a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. Astronomers have known for years that, on large scales, the universe has voids largely empty of matter. However, most of these voids […]