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Each of us is afraid of something:
snakes, spiders, being trapped in a small place,
drowning, everyone has their fears but one thing that we all have in common is fear of the dark. Sure,
it's not so scary when you're safe in your house and the power goes out, but think about our ancestors on a
cloudy moonless night with no fire or electricity and with little shelter from the unknown. That's real darkness,
and that's why so many of us always have that fear in the back of our minds.
Even if it's no longer very rational. Now imagine you're the last person on Earth,
smack dab in the middle of the US and it's pitch black.
Now erase everything but a handful of small towns on the east and west coast no cars, no trees, no houses,
nothing. Now imagine
there's no sound, not even of your own breathing.
No matter how hard you try to see through the darkness or hear even the faintest sound,
there's nothing. The ground drops out beneath you and you can no longer tell which way is up or down.
The darkness and silence surrounds you for miles in every direction.
Multiply this by several million times and you've got the loneliest place in the entire universe: The Boötes Void.
Located about 700 million light-years from Earth,
the Boötes Void,
also ominously known as "The Great Nothing," is often referred to as a super void, one of the very largest voids in existence.
How large exactly? About 330 million light-years or roughly a third of a percent of the visible universe.
It might not sound that big compared to the entire universe,
But when you consider just how many
galaxies, stars, and planets an area of that size should have, it becomes a bit more
apparent. The Boötes Void contains about 60 galaxies when we would expect to see over
2,000, as well as hundreds of billions of stars in a similarly sized region.
The 60 galaxies are the small towns in our earlier analogy, and an America like we see today
Is roughly equivalent to what we would normally see in other regions of space. Just to get this out of the way, this picture,
commonly shown to illustrate the void is not of the Boötes Void.
It's actually Barnard 68, a dark nebula that does not allow light to pass through.
It's just a heck of a lot closer and has fewer stars in front of it,
which makes for a darker and more voidy image.
But, back to the size of the void, to better illustrate its monstrous scale, picture it like this:
The void is about 330 million light-years in diameter. The Milky Way is about
53,000 light-years across. We could fit over
6200 of our galaxy end-to-end inside the void, and that's only in one direction.
Another odd characteristic of the great nothing is that it's almost perfectly spherical.
Its total volume is somewhere around two hundred sixty-three thousand mega parsecs cubed, which to put it simply, is really really big.
If you started on one side and wanted to fly all the way across, it would take you
330 million years, if your ship could travel at the speed of light which is likely impossible. If we took the fastest man-made object in
the universe, the Parker Solar Probe, and sent it across the void,
It would take over five hundred nine billion years to reach the other side, and the Solar Probe isn't slow either.
When it reaches its estimated top speed sometime in 2024,
it'll be traveling at almost 700 thousand kilometers per hour. At that speed
you could get from Washington DC to Tokyo in less than a minute, or from DC to Philadelphia in under a second.
So yeah, the Boötes Void is absurdly huge.
It's so empty and so dark and lonely that if the Milky Way existed at its center, we wouldn't have known any other galaxies existed
until the 1960s, simply because their light wouldn't have reached us. As we learned in a previous video,
there's no real empty space in space.
So, what exactly is the void made of? We're not entirely sure, but we do know there's so little
gravitational interference, so few foreign objects that it might as well be empty.
Voids typically contain less than 1/10 of the matter abundance of other regions.
It's theorized that voids originated as galaxies and other matter clustered together into long branches or filaments, due to the properties of those
particular galaxies, and the gaps left between the filaments became the barren cosmic wastelands we see today.
It's less interesting than assuming these blank regions are a giant graveyard stripped of their energy and resources by highly advanced type 3
civilizations, but realistically even the largest voids likely have natural explanations.
The Boötes void for example, is thought to be the result of multiple smaller voids slowly merging together like soap bubbles.
This would explain why its 60 galaxies are arranged in a manner that would indicate a past barrier between the two,
kind of like how bubbles press together and create clear division before they merge fully.
So no matter how lonely your life is on Earth, at least you can look outside and see people, trees, and clouds.
There's stuff happening all around you and all around the entire Earth, and all around the solar system.
We should consider ourselves lucky,
we didn't happen to develop in one of the lonely galaxies of the enormous pitch-black Boötes Void,
but even if you were in the great nothing right now, you still couldn't escape this week's sponsor read, but seriously
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