Huge Hole Found in the Universe

In summary: Summary: In summary, an article from space.com by Robert Roy Britt in 2007 discusses a large empty space in the universe that is devoid of normal matter and dark matter. This space is about a billion light-years across and its temperature is slightly colder than the rest of the universe. The cause of this cold spot is still being studied and some theories suggest it could be the imprint of another universe beyond our own. There are other known voids in the universe, with the largest being the Boötes Void at 330 million light-years across. However, the existence and size of this void mentioned in the article is still unconfirmed and the article is 13 years old.
  • #1
Buzz Bloom
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TL;DR Summary
This is from an article in space.com by by Robert Roy Britt August 23, 2007.
The hole is nearly a billion light-years across. This one is mostly devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter, and it's also strangely empty of the mysterious "dark matter" that permeates the cosmos.
Other space voids have been found before, but nothing on this scale.
https://www.space.com/4271-huge-hole-universe.html

I would much appreciate any links cited to more information about this hole, especially more recent information. I would also appreciate any information to clarify the following questions.

How much baryonic matter is actually present (taking into account “mostly devoid”)?

Is is mostly hydrogen gas, i.e., either atomic H or H2?

How is this measured?

How it is possible to ascertain the amount (or absence) of dark matter present (taking into account that the presence of dark matter is usually calculated by the pattern of orbits of baryonic matter in a galaxy)?

How big are other space voids (presumably having no stars)?

How far away from Earth are these other voids?

ADDED:
The link at the top. I apologize for forgetting to put it in. I blame it on a senior moment. Thank you @phinds for reminding me.
 
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  • #2
Buzz Bloom said:
Summary:: This is from an article in space.com by by Robert Roy Britt August 23, 2007.
Buzz, you've been here long enough to know that a SPECIFIC citation is expected.

Also, I think I remember fairly recent discussion(s) here on PF about voids so you might try a forum search
 
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  • #3
Buzz, here is what you do.

You get the article by Britt. You then go to your favorite search engine and plug in relevant words from the article: Rudnick, Williams, VLA, Astrophysical Journal. I used Google, and the 2nd link was the paper in question.
 
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  • #4
Vanadium 50 said:
You get the article by Britt. You then go to your favorite search engine and plug in relevant words from the article: Rudnick, Williams, VLA, Astrophysical Journal. I used Google, and the 2nd link was the paper in question.
Hi Van:

I do appreciate your help, but I have had some currently unsolved problems. I have tried using both Google and Firefox with several search lists:
Rudnick, Williams, VLA, Astrophysical Journal,​
Astrophysical Journal Rudnick Brown Williams, and​
Astrophysical Journal Rudnick Brown Williams billion light-years.​
The only result that was even partially useful was finding several times
I can find nothing at this site for searching for an author or a topic. There was a button for selecting a particular volume. I assumed that the year of publication would be 2007, so I tried the first 2007 issue:
Vol 654, 2007.​
When I clicked on "GO", I got the following options.
Latest issues
° Number 2, January 2007
° Number 1, January 2007
I clicked on "Number 1", and I got a list of 53 article titles, each with a list of authors. Unfortunately I was unable to find any way to automatically search for an author on the page. The normal search of Firefox or Google for text on a page failed to work.

I confess I gave up. It seems to me to be too difficult to visually search each issue for the year 2007, article by article, and author by author.

Do have any suggestions?

ADDED
BTW: I did find a paper on a different topic that interests me.

Regards,
Buzz
 
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  • #6
Vanadium 50 said:
Anyone who didn't get https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/522222 raise their hands.
Hi Van:

Thank you very much for the link. I confess I have not read it carefully yet, but I have scanned through it, and I find it to be likely that it is much over my head, and I will not be able to find in it any understandable answers to the questions I included in post #1. I also did not find any clear understandable support for several statements made in the SPACE.COM article:
1. The hole is nearly a billion light-years across.​
2. Rather, this one is mostly devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter, and it's also strangely empty of the mysterious "dark matter" that permeates the cosmos.​
3. "Although our surprising results need independent confirmation, the slightly colder temperature of the CMB in this region appears to be caused by a huge hole devoid of nearly all matter roughly 6 to 10 billion light-years from Earth," Rudnick said.​
It is of course possible some of these statements are based on material from earlier referenced articles.

Regards,
Buzz
 
  • #7
[edit by mod to remove response to misinformation]

@Buzz Bloom - on large scales, inhomogeneities in matter density can cause a redshift variation due to something called the "integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect". Essentially, due to cosmological expansion light doesn't lose the same energy climbing out of an over-dense region as it gains falling into it, and you can see a slight change in the redshift as a result. The abstract of the IOP Science paper Vanadium 50 linked says that they can explain the observed redshift variation in this portion of the sky if there's a very nearly completely empty space, but that's highly improbable.
 
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  • #8
Thread re-opened after cleanup of misinformation and responses to it.
 
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  • #9
Curious, back to the OP. Wikipedia has the Bootes Void as the largest known void with a diameter of 330M LY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boötes_void

This would be 3x larger if confirmed. I would assume the other known voids similarly void of dark matter? It would seem logical
 
  • #10
BWV said:
Curious, back to the OP. Wikipedia has the Bootes Void as the largest known void with a diameter of 330M LY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boötes_void

This would be 3x larger if confirmed. I would assume the other known voids similarly void of dark matter? It would seem logical
Not a direct reply, but note that the article/discovery in the OP is 13 years old.
 
  • #11
russ_watters said:
Not a direct reply, but note that the article/discovery in the OP is 13 years old.
Saw that, and there is a Wikipedia article on it where it still appears unconfirmed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMB_cold_spot

Although someone offered this explanation:

A controversial claim by Laura Mersini-Houghton is that it could be the imprint of another universe beyond our own, caused by quantum entanglement between universes before they were separated by cosmic inflation.[3] Laura Mersini-Houghton said, "Standard cosmology cannot explain such a giant cosmic hole" and made the remarkable hypothesis that the WMAP cold spot is "… the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own."
 
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  • #12
BWV said:
Curious, back to the OP. Wikipedia has the Bootes Void as the largest known void with a diameter of 330M LY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boötes_void

This would be 3x larger if confirmed. I would assume the other known voids similarly void of dark matter? It would seem logical
Worth noting that Wikipedia's list of voids has quite a few larger than Bootes.

I don't know the answer to your question either, but it occurs to me that if there was significant dark matter in a void it would be unlikely to form. As I understand it, voids (of any size) form because over-dense regions contract under their own gravity leaving under-dense regions growing. If a void is full of dark matter then it isn't under-dense and there is less of a mechanism driving the surrounding visible matter to collapse, and the not-actually-under-dense region won't grow. I could be wrong, though.
 
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  • #13
Buzz Bloom said:
2. Rather, this one is mostly devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter, and it's also strangely empty of the mysterious "dark matter" that permeates the cosmos.

That isn't strange, As BWV said "logical" and as @Drakkith said in another thread on voids
"if it had dark matter in it ( the void) then there would, because of gravitational attraction, also be normal matter"
 
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  • #14
davenn said:
That isn't strange

Hi Dave:

What I find strange is not that there might not be dark matter present, but I do not know of any possible way in which this can be observed. I am guessing you might be saying that the conclusion about dark matter might be a conjecture based on some model which projects that the presence of dark matter would imply that a greater amount of baryonic matter would be present than that which is observed. I also get that the paper says that baryonic matter is mostly not present. What I have not found in the paper (so far) is a specific number related to the actual baryonic density in the hole. As I mentioned in post #6, this absent information may possibly be in some of the referenced papers.

BTW: I vaguely remember reading recently about a mechanism for dark matter to create some (most? all?) of the primordial matter density perturbations. I do not recall reading anywhere any mechanism for dark matter to vacate a large void.

Regards,
Buzz
 
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  • #15
Buzz Bloom said:
What I find strange is not that there might not be dark matter present, but I do not know of any possible way in which this can be observed.
The integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect is what the paper linked by Vanadium 50 says is what they used. See post #7.
 
  • #16
BWV said:
A controversial claim by Laura Mersini-Houghton is that it could be the imprint of another universe beyond our own, caused by quantum entanglement between universes before they were separated by cosmic inflation.[3] Laura Mersini-Houghton said, "Standard cosmology cannot explain such a giant cosmic hole" and made the remarkable hypothesis that the WMAP cold spot is "… the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own."
Hi BWV:

I am wondering if you might know (perhaps based on seeing various posts by monitors) if this claim (or similar claims that are not scientifically testable) is considered by PFs to be a part of science.

Regards,
Buzz
 
  • #17
Ibix said:
The integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect
Hi Ibix:

I am confused by the following from
It occurs when the Universe is dominated in its energy density by something other than matter. If the Universe is dominated by radiation, or by dark energy, though, those potentials do evolve, subtly changing the energy of photons passing through them.​
This puts a limit on when this phenomenon happens. Since the discussion is about events after decoupling, radiation is irrelevant. If dark energy is cause of the phenomenon, how does it work to make dark matter to be not present?

Regards,
Buzz
 
  • #18
Buzz Bloom said:
Hi BWV:

I am wondering if you might know (perhaps based on seeing various posts by monitors) if this claim (or similar claims that are not scientifically testable) is considered by PFs to be a part of science.

Regards,
Buzz

If feasible testability was the standard for theoretical physics they wouldn’t they have to shut down the whole ‘Beyond the Standard Model’ forum? Judging from her Wikipedia page , she is a real astrophysicist that has done serious work.
 
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  • #19
Buzz Bloom said:
If dark energy is cause of the phenomenon, how does it work to make dark matter to be not present?
I think you are misunderstanding. Density variation in matter and dark matter causes there to be large scale gravity wells associated with over-dense areas and gravity whatever-the-opposite-of-wells-is where there are under-dense regions. In a dark energy dominated universe, the way the expansion of the universe works tends to "flatten out" the potentials. So a photon loses less energy as it comes out of a well than it gained going in, leading to a slight blue-shift. For reasons I don't understand (I'd have to track down a detailed mathematical description of the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect), this frequency shift doesn't happen in a matter dominated universe.

All the paper is saying is that they reckon they can account for the "cold spot" if there's a completely empty region there. Dark energy isn't responsible for making it empty. It's just responsible for a detectable change in photon redshifts when they cross such a region.
 
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  • #20
Curious what the maximum amount / density of matter (dark or otherwise) needed to show the region as 'empty' if gravitational effects on EM is the only yardstick available. How much dark (as in not emitting light, not as in dark matter) stuff could be in these voids?
 
  • #21
BWV said:
If feasible testability was the standard for theoretical physics
Hi BWV:

I am thinking that the standard need not be "feasible testability", but rather "in principle possible testability". If no one has any idea about how it might be theoretically possible to test a hypothesis with observation, it seems to me that this is a very serious lack.

For example, at the present time it is not feasible to observe Hawking radiation from a black hole. However, it is theortically likely to become possible when at some distant time in the future the CMB radiation temperature becomes less than the temperature of Hawking radiation.

Regards,
Buzz
 
  • #22
davenn said:
That isn't strange, As BWV said "logical" and as @Drakkith said in another thread on voids
"if it had dark matter in it ( the void) then there would, because of gravitational attraction, also be normal matter"
Doesn't the apparent correlation of the lack of matter to the lack of dark matter also imply that dark matter is not some very exotic particle but probably normal matter such as some form of Hydrogen as some have suggested?

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2005/02/dark-matter-need-not-apply
 
  • #23
Ibix said:
I think you are misunderstanding.
. . .
Dark energy isn't responsible for making it empty. It's just responsible for a detectable change in photon redshifts when they cross such a region.
Hi Ibix:

I think that this dark energy point is a very good answer to my quote #3 in post #6 from SPACE.COM.
3. "Although our surprising results need independent confirmation, the slightly colder temperature of the CMB in this region appears to be caused by a huge hole devoid of nearly all matter roughly 6 to 10 billion light-years from Earth," Rudnick said.​

You are right about my misunderstanding. I was thinking that my quote #2 was being discussed.
2. Rather, this one is mostly devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter, and it's also strangely empty of the mysterious "dark matter" that permeates the cosmos.​

Regards,
Buzz
 
  • #24
Buzz Bloom said:
Hi BWV:

I am wondering if you might know (perhaps based on seeing various posts by monitors) if this claim (or similar claims that are not scientifically testable) is considered by PFs to be a part of science.

Regards,
Buzz
Here’s the first of two articles (published in Phys Rev D) dealing with the claims in question:
https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0611223

Edit: the “parallel universes” in question have to do with potential quantum entanglement between a portion of our observable universe and a portion of the unobservable universe beyond the particle horizon. Presumably particles which were entangled in the pre-inflation universe would remain entangled after inflation, even though they would no longer be causally connected.
 
  • #25
TeethWhitener said:
“parallel universes” in question have to do with potential quantum entanglement between a portion of our observable universe and a portion of the unobservable universe
Hi TW:

I guess I misunderstood the language "parallel universe" used by Dr. Houghton, and I thought it to be referring to the multi-universe interpretation of QM. I now see it was intended to mean two distinct portions of our universe (not separate entire universes). One portion contains the mass of our observable universe. The other is some mass not currently in out observable universe, but it was included at an earlier period of time as part of an younger observable universe which also included the mass of what is our current observable universe.

Now that I understand what Dr. Houghton was saying, I still have some reservations about it, which you (or perhaps another PFs participant) might be able to clarify for me. I may be mistaken , but I thought that in the earlier time of our universe when z>9 the dark energy density was much less than mass density, and the volume of an observable universe got larger. For small values of z the observable universe may loose a part of it as the universe expands. If this is correct, how does it fit in with Dr. Houghton's idea?

Regards,
Buzz
 
  • #26
Buzz Bloom said:
Now that I understand what Dr. Houghton was saying, I still have some reservations about it, which you (or perhaps another PFs participant) might be able to clarify for me. I may be mistaken , but I thought that in the earlier time of our universe when z>9 the dark energy density was much less than mass density, and the volume of an observable universe got larger. For small values of z the observable universe may loose a part of it as the universe expands. If this is correct, how does it fit in with Dr. Houghton's idea?
Caveat: I am not a cosmologist.

Inflation only lasted for 10-32 seconds or so. That’s long enough for light to travel a few thousand Planck lengths, but the size of the universe is theorized to have expanded by a factor of something like 1030. So particles which were causally connected—and possibly entangled—before inflation could easily be no longer causally connected after inflation, though presumably they would still be entangled. The paper is looking at what observable astrophysical traces such a situation would leave in the CMB data.
 
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  • #27
So far, no one has raised the question of whether something is leaking through these huge holes😛
 
  • #28
BWV said:
A controversial claim by Laura Mersini-Houghton is that it could be the imprint of another universe beyond our own, caused by quantum entanglement between universes before they were separated by cosmic inflation.[3] Laura Mersini-Houghton said, "Standard cosmology cannot explain such a giant cosmic hole" and made the remarkable hypothesis that the WMAP cold spot is "… the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own."
I thought that our universe didn't have a edge, and also that it was concluded to be infinite.
 
  • #29
StandardsGuy said:
I thought that our universe didn't have a edge, and also that it was concluded to be infinite.
The observable universe has an edge: even if the universe is infinite, it’s impossible to see back in time farther than the distance light has traveled since the Big Bang, even in principle.
 
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  • #30
TeethWhitener said:
The observable universe has an edge: even if the universe is infinite, it’s impossible to see back in time farther than the distance light has traveled since the Big Bang, even in principle.
What if you are looking through a wormhole that connects much further?
 
  • #31
bob012345 said:
What if you are looking through a wormhole that connects much further?
Then you are talking about a different spacetime, one that includes such wormholes. The behaviour of it might (not necessarily will, but might) be very different from the spacetime being modeled here. If we were to find evidence of such wormholes we would have to reevaluate the plausibility of this model.
 
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  • #32
When I saw the title, I thought of this:

1603309721633.png
 
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  • #33
bob012345 said:
What if you are looking through a wormhole that connects much further?
A finite speed of light over a finite length of time gives a finite distance. So the observable universe would still be finite, even if the total universe is not homeomorphic to Minkowski spacetime.
 
  • #34
TeethWhitener said:
A finite speed of light over a finite length of time gives a finite distance. So the observable universe would still be finite, even if the total universe is not homeomorphic to Minkowski spacetime.
Are you saying a wormhole could not connect to a point beyond the edge of the observable universe from our vantage point?
 
  • #35
bob012345 said:
Are you saying a wormhole could not connect to a point beyond the edge of the observable universe from our vantage point?
Well if we could observe it, it wouldn’t be beyond the edge of the observable universe, now would it?

But it would still be a finite distance. Reread post 29.
 
<h2>1. What is the "Huge Hole Found in the Universe"?</h2><p>The "Huge Hole Found in the Universe" refers to a large void or empty space discovered in the cosmic web of the universe. It is estimated to be about 1 billion light years across and is located in the Eridanus constellation.</p><h2>2. How was the Huge Hole in the Universe discovered?</h2><p>The Huge Hole in the Universe was discovered through a combination of data from various telescopes, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Pan-STARRS1 survey. These surveys mapped the distribution of galaxies in the universe and revealed the large void in the cosmic web.</p><h2>3. What could have caused the Huge Hole in the Universe?</h2><p>The exact cause of the Huge Hole in the Universe is still unknown. Some theories suggest that it could be the result of the expansion of the universe, while others propose that it may be due to the gravitational pull of nearby galaxy clusters.</p><h2>4. How does the Huge Hole in the Universe affect our understanding of the universe?</h2><p>The discovery of the Huge Hole in the Universe challenges our current understanding of the universe and its structure. It suggests that there may be other large voids or empty spaces in the cosmic web that we have yet to discover. This could lead to new theories and models about the evolution of the universe.</p><h2>5. Is the Huge Hole in the Universe a threat to Earth?</h2><p>No, the Huge Hole in the Universe poses no threat to Earth. It is located at a safe distance from our planet and does not affect our daily lives in any way. It is simply a fascinating discovery that expands our knowledge of the vastness and complexity of the universe.</p>

1. What is the "Huge Hole Found in the Universe"?

The "Huge Hole Found in the Universe" refers to a large void or empty space discovered in the cosmic web of the universe. It is estimated to be about 1 billion light years across and is located in the Eridanus constellation.

2. How was the Huge Hole in the Universe discovered?

The Huge Hole in the Universe was discovered through a combination of data from various telescopes, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Pan-STARRS1 survey. These surveys mapped the distribution of galaxies in the universe and revealed the large void in the cosmic web.

3. What could have caused the Huge Hole in the Universe?

The exact cause of the Huge Hole in the Universe is still unknown. Some theories suggest that it could be the result of the expansion of the universe, while others propose that it may be due to the gravitational pull of nearby galaxy clusters.

4. How does the Huge Hole in the Universe affect our understanding of the universe?

The discovery of the Huge Hole in the Universe challenges our current understanding of the universe and its structure. It suggests that there may be other large voids or empty spaces in the cosmic web that we have yet to discover. This could lead to new theories and models about the evolution of the universe.

5. Is the Huge Hole in the Universe a threat to Earth?

No, the Huge Hole in the Universe poses no threat to Earth. It is located at a safe distance from our planet and does not affect our daily lives in any way. It is simply a fascinating discovery that expands our knowledge of the vastness and complexity of the universe.

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