# Show me the filaments and voids! **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 27, 2015, 6:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/show-me-the-filaments-and-voids/735852 "2015-10-27T06:04:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![mandala](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mandala/32/95_2.png) [@mandala](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mandala)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2015, 6:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/show-me-the-filaments-and-voids/735852/1 "2015-10-27T06:04:45Z")
If we peer far enough into deep space, we should be able to see the filamentous, spidery large-scale structure of the Universe - the scientific opinion being that filaments and voids are the largest observable contiguous structures in the Universe. But the Hubble UDF photos show galaxies scattered all over, right upto 13 billion light years away - a short time after the BB - with the said filamentary structures entirely undiscernable. Why so? If those filaments do exist - and are not a statistical deduction but an observable reality, the HUDF should bring them up. All the images I have seen of the filaments and voids are computer-simulated projections, never actual photographs. Anyone can set me straight on this? ---
**Author:** ![Learjeff](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/94ad74/32.png) [@Learjeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Learjeff)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2015, 6:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/show-me-the-filaments-and-voids/735852/2 "2015-10-27T06:10:52Z")
Wild guess: 13BYA, these structures had not yet emerged. Gravity takes time to work it’s magic on supergallactic scales. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2015, 6:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/show-me-the-filaments-and-voids/735852/3 "2015-10-27T06:44:43Z")
If we’re _inside_ a filament, how would we be able to see the larger structure from Hubble? Kind of like how we can’t see the arm structure of the Milky Way when we look at it, it just stretches across the sky. ---
**Author:** ![naita](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/naita/32/5862_2.png) [@naita](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/naita)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2015, 7:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/show-me-the-filaments-and-voids/735852/4 "2015-10-27T07:11:00Z")
Do you know the scale of the HUD and the scale of the filaments? ---
**Author:** ![Meme\_Chose](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/2acd7d/32.png) [@Meme\_Chose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Meme_Chose)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2015, 1:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/show-me-the-filaments-and-voids/735852/5 "2015-10-27T13:11:37Z")
[http://www.nature.com/news/dark-matter-s-tendrils-revealed-1.10951](http://www.nature.com/news/dark-matter-s-tendrils-revealed-1.10951) ---
**Author:** ![mandala](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mandala/32/95_2.png) [@mandala](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mandala)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2015, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/show-me-the-filaments-and-voids/735852/6 "2015-10-27T13:39:45Z")
> [@naita](#): > > Do you know the scale of the HUD and the scale of the filaments? No I do not, please enlighten me. When Hubble peers say 6 billion LY away, shouldn’t a filament, or a fragment of it, 9 billion LY away photobomb it? What, it’s not that simple? ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2015, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/show-me-the-filaments-and-voids/735852/7 "2015-10-27T15:26:30Z")
> [@mandala](#): > > No I do not, please enlighten me. When Hubble **peers say 6 billion LY away** , shouldn’t a filament, or a fragment of it, 9 billion LY away photobomb it? What, it’s not that simple? Bolding mine. And the bolded part is your misconception. The Hubble isn’t looking at a specific distance. It’s looking at everything between one inch away and forever away. The limitation on how far it can see is entirely how bright the stuff it’s pointed at happens to be. The things it sees that are farthest away are the ones that are (were) brightest. Other things at the same distance that are (were) dimmer are unseen. It’s also the case that nearby things are seen as they were just a few years a ago. Whereas distant things are seen as they were millions or billions of years ago. So we can’t take a picture \*now \*of how the large scale geometry is _now_. We can only take a picture now that shows different distance slices at different times in the past. From that it’s not too difficult to compute a graphic of the structure. But we can’t take a picture of it. Finally, the structure is pretty amorphous. It’s not like a lacework of solid rods and empty space. More like areas of really-empty space and areas of slightly-less-empty space. ---
**Author:** ![Blue\_Blistering\_Barnacle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/blue_blistering_barnacle/32/3386_2.png) [@Blue\_Blistering\_Barnacle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blue_Blistering_Barnacle)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2015, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/show-me-the-filaments-and-voids/735852/8 "2015-10-27T16:11:53Z")
Also, the universe is a lot like a sponge or a foam, with holes and walls. It is heterogeneous on the scale of the bubbles, but looking at larger scales, it seems pretty homogeneous (like looking at a piece of Styrofoam). Further, when looking outward with a telescope, all the bubbles and wall are piled up upon one another (like looking at an x-ray of a piece of Styrofoam). The bubble-like nature of the universe first became apparent through careful measurement of distances of galaxies observed in a narrow slice. > **[Void (astronomy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_(astronomy)#Methods_for_finding_voids)** > > Cosmic voids (also known as dark space) are vast spaces between filaments (the largest-scale structures in the universe), which contain very few or no galaxies. The cosmological evolution of the void regions differs drastically from the evolution of the Universe as a whole: there is a long stage when the curvature term dominates, which prevents the formation of galaxy clusters and massive galaxies. Hence, although even the emptiest regions of voids contain more than ~15% of the average matter den... [http://genesismission.jpl.nasa.gov/educate/scimodule/Cosmogony/CosmogonyPDF/SpongyUniverseST.pdf](http://genesismission.jpl.nasa.gov/educate/scimodule/Cosmogony/CosmogonyPDF/SpongyUniverseST.pdf) ---
**Author:** ![naita](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/naita/32/5862_2.png) [@naita](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/naita)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2015, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/show-me-the-filaments-and-voids/735852/9 "2015-10-27T17:29:42Z")
> [@naita](#): > > Do you know the scale of the HUD and the scale of the filaments? > [@mandala](#): > > No I do not, please enlighten me. When Hubble peers say 6 billion LY away, shouldn’t a filament, or a fragment of it, 9 billion LY away photobomb it? What, it’s not that simple? I don’t know either, and the exact information I was looking for is hard to find, but here’s one sentence from the article on such a filament: > [@](#): > > The paper states that “14 of the 31 GRBs are concentrated within 45 degrees of the sky”,[4] which translates to the size of about 10 billion light-years (about 3 billion parsecs) in its longest dimension, which is approximately 1/9 (10.7%) of the diameter of the observable universe. > **[Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules-Corona_Borealis_Great_Wall)** > > The Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall (HCB) or simply the Great Wall is a galaxy filament that is the largest known structure in the observable universe, measuring approximately 10 billion light-years in length (the observable universe is about 93 billion light-years in diameter). This massive superstructure is a region of the sky seen in the data set mapping of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) that has been found to have a concentration of similarly distanced GRBs that is unusually higher than The over... Now compare that to the HUD: > [@](#): > > Located southwest of Orion in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax, the rectangular image is 2.4 arcminutes to an edge,[4] or 3.4 arcminutes diagonally. This is approximately one tenth of the angular diameter of a full moon viewed from Earth (which is less than 34 arcminutes),[5] smaller than a 1 mm by 1 mm square of paper held at 1 meter away, and equal to roughly one thirteen-millionth of the total area of the sky. By my estimation, mind you I’m not an astrophyscisist, you’re complaining that a photo taken by a guy in Siberia shows trees spread evenly when you’ve read that the boreal forest is a band around the world.