Meet Barnard 68, which is — if we are to believe the Internet (which it isn’t) — “an empty void of space so large that if you traveled through it you would not collide with anything for 752,536,988 years.”
While it’s smart not to limit speed (hey, it’s technically true that if you travel at a few meters per year you probably won’t hit anything in 752,536,988 years), that’s definitely not the case.
Color composite of visible and near-infrared images of Barnard 68.
What you see above is an actual image of the dark Barnard Nebula 68 – which is so close (400 light-years) that nothing can be seen between it and the Sun – taken by the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope. in March 1999. However, it is absolutely packed with stars, even if you can’t see them when you image the area using visible light, thanks to the molecular cloud.
like ESO explains“At these wavelengths, the small cloud is completely opaque due to the opaque effect of the dust particles within it.”
If you photograph it in infrared, here are the stars:
Composite image of Barnard 68. The center, colored red, shows the area imaged in infrared.
As Francesca Benson of IFLScience said, saying it’s the void of space because you can’t see behind the dark nebula is like claiming the sun doesn’t exist because of the clouds.
But lovers of large and strange voids in space, do not despair, because there are many mysteries in the endless space of the universe.
The great nothingness: an actual void in space
The Boötes Void, often referred to as the “Great Nothing” or “The Great Void,” is an actual swath of space that contains fewer galaxies than you might expect. It is between 250 and 330 million light-years across, and is one of the largest voids we know of. To put that in context, that’s about 2% of the diameter Of the entire visible universe.
The void was first discovered in 1981, during a redshift survey of galaxies. published their results in a paper Under the title “A million parsecs of void in Boötes?”, the astronomers note that one plausible explanation for the data they collected is that the region is “almost devoid of galaxies.”
Slowly, astronomers began to find galaxies in the region, and by 1997 it was confirmed that there were about 60 galaxies in the region. Nothing great Its a region that should contain roughly 2,000 galaxies (if space were like this). While there is little about the void to suggest that our ideas about the formation of galaxies are incorrect — one possible explanation is that they formed from the merger of smaller voids — it is still a strange thought experiment to imagine how someone inside a void must view the universe.
As an astronomer Greg Aldering said: “If the Milky Way had been in the middle of the Boötes vacuum, we would not have known about the existence of other galaxies until the 1960s.”
A previous version of this article was published in August 2022.
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