All articles tagged with #cosmic voids
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will map thousands of cosmic voids to better understand the universe's expansion and the nature of dark energy by observing the distribution and shapes of these vast, sparsely populated regions, which can reveal key insights into the universe's composition and evolution.
New observations have found over 20,000 "hungry" black holes in cosmic voids, which are essentially "3D bubbles of space" that contain just a handful of galaxies, if any at all. These invisible beasts "snack" more often when there are fewer interacting neighbors to interrupt them. The findings challenge the current understanding of how galaxies evolve and how black holes grow in galaxies that are friendless in their cosmic neighborhood and thus do not interact with each other.
MCG+01-02-015 is the loneliest galaxy in the Universe, located in a particularly sparse, underdense "void" region. Our best telescopes identify no other substantial galaxies within ~100 million light-years. Despite the visual appearance of other galaxies near MCG+01-02-015, none of these galaxies are actually located in the same region of space. This isolated perspective would have made discovering our cosmic origins far more challenging.
Astronomers discovered the first cosmic void in the early 1970s, which was a blank space devoid of galaxies almost 20 megaparsec, or 65 million light-years, across. This discovery was made after the realization that there was more in the Universe than mere galaxies and clusters, and that there was something larger - the supercluster. With the advancement of technology and techniques, astronomers were able to map the heavens and understand the large-scale structure of the Universe, including the clumping of galaxies into clusters and clusters into superclusters.