Void (astronomy)

In astronomy, voids are the empty spaces between filaments, the largest-scale structures in the Universe, that contain very few, or no, galaxies. They were first discovered in 1978 during a pioneering study by Stephen Gregory and Laird A. Thompson at the Kitt Peak National Observatory.^[1] Voids typically have a diameter of 11 to 150 megaparsecs; particularly large voids, defined by the absence of rich superclusters, are sometimes called "supervoids". Voids located in high-density environments are smaller than voids situated in low-density spaces of the universe.^[2] Voids are believed to have been formed by baryon acoustic oscillations in the Big Bang by collapses of mass followed by implosions of the compressed baryonic matter.

See also

• List of voids
• List of superclusters
• Large-scale structure of the universe

References

External links

• Universe family tree: Void
• Animated views of voids and their distribution from Hume Feldman with Sergei Shandarin, Dept. Physics and Astronomy, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA.
• Visualization of Nearby Large-Scale Structures Fairall, A. P., Paverd, W. R., & Ashley, R. P.