Posted on 06/08/2017 8:32:28 PM PDT by MtnClimber
If you went to give our cosmic address, you might tell someone that we lived on planet Earth, orbiting our Sun, on the outskirts of a spur of the Milky Way's spiral arms, in the second largest galaxy in our local group, about 50 million light years from the Virgo Cluster, embedded within the Laniakea supercluster. Well, you might have to add another line to that address, as Laniakia, along with dozens of other nearby giant clusters, is all embedded within a great cosmic void stretching a billion light years from end-to-end. This below-average region of space is consistent with everything we observe, supported by new observations presented at this week's American Astronomical Society meeting, and just might provide the solution to one of the Universe's greatest discrepancies.
On the largest scales, the Universe is uniform, with equal amounts of matter and energy everywhere. If you drew an imaginary sphere a few billion light years wide around any point and measured the total amount of mass inside, you'd get the same number everywhere, to about 99.99% accuracy. But if your sphere were smaller, you'd see you'd start to get different numbers in different locations. Gravitation pulls matter into filaments, groups and clusters of galaxies, and steals matter away from less dense regions, creating great cosmic voids.
Today, matter in the Universe is distributed like a combination of a spider web and swiss cheese. The "holes" in the Universe are stupendous, with some stretching tens of millions of light years across before you run into any galaxies at all.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Well, only the galaxy on the right has the right of way.
Also bear in mind that our poles “point” to specific regions of the milky way since our orbital plane is perpendicular to the galaxy orbital plane.
Our north pole points through the thickest portion through the galaxy center 80K light years to the opposite edge. Our south pole points to the nearer galaxy edge, around 35K light years away.
We need to be in a region of rare debris, for obvious reasons.
Check out the sky on a moonless night in a dark place such as northern Arizona. You are looking at a view as if you were travelling through interstellar space. There is nothing else to see.
Considering what lives in the cites, unless suitably armed, that is a good thing and place to be.
Amazingly, when you are in a place that is truly "dark", the milky way is so bright, it casts a shadow. Most people in the USA have never seen truly dark skies. Many nights at sea, I've seen the milky way from horizon to horizon, but atop Mauna Kea on a new moon was the brightest I've seen it. Even when I camp in the high sierra or northern Idaho, it's not even close to that experience. Until relatively recently, our ancestors saw the milky way in all its glory on every moonless night.
Agreed! Gamma ray bursts can really ruin your day.
The void surrounding us makes us unique. Located anywhere else, the beightness of surrounding galaxies would wash out our ability to see back into the early stages of our universe.
I live in Montana and am amazed still at how bright our night skies are compared to more populated areas. The Milky Way on a clear moonless night is spectacular.
When I travel I’m always a little taken aback at the lack of darkness in nighttime. there is so much ambient light bouncing around.
My backpack trip this year is to the Bob Marshall Wilderness. I went there for the first time last year and the night skies were magical.
Somebody walks in to their insurance company office and sits down with their representative, and says, “Well, I know my insurance covers a zombie apocalypse, but do I have coverage in case of colliding with the Andromeda Galaxy?”
According to research carried out by Amy Barger’s team at University of Wisconsin-Madison, the void that contains our Milky Way is huge, spherical, and contains not only our own local supercluster but many superclusters beyond that. Although simulations predict voids ranging from tens of millions of light years up to a few billion, our measurements haven’t gotten good enough to measure the largest voids precisely. With a radius of roughly one billion light years, the void containing our Milky Way, known as the KBC void (for scientists Keenan, Barger, and Cowie), is the largest confirmed void in the Universe.
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That’s because we’re rare and special.
The author is a flaming homo, so naturally he thinks of it as below average.
A God who created everything, placed us in the perfect place in the universe. Fantastic!
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Maybe our conscious existence created the Universe.
The void surrounding us makes us unique.
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That’s a better way of thinking about it than saying we’re below average.
Maybe we are in a good neighborhood. We moved away from all the riffraff.
Who cares?
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