There's a big hole in the sky

I guess it’s up to us Floridians to find the wet spot, then.

So tell us, ultrafilter, just how many cans of Great Stuff™ and how many rolls of duct tape do we need to patch up that puppy? Give or take a dozen.

In R’lyeh, deep R’lyeh,

Cthulhu sleeps tonight.

Hush, my darling, no fear, my darling,

Cthulhu sleeps tonight . . .

That’s easy. It’s about 1/3 up the anterior side of the universe.

  • Waves *

That’s pretty much what I thought of when I read the article. Well, that and every other scifi “But we’ll destroy the fabric of space and time!” story in scifi.

They’ve found Space Texas.

“Don’t Mess With Space Texas”?

Wow, this is huge.

Here’s the image page referenced in the article.

Allow me to interpret using my enthusiastic layman’s understanding of the whole thing.

The blackish gray cone shape in the upper image is meant to represent the universe as we see it on the largest scale. The wispy shapes are an artist’s conception (or perhaps the actual computer-generated map, it’s hard to tell from the caption) of very very long-range views of groups of galaxies.

As radio telescopy advanced, and coordinated groups of radio telescopes such as the Very Large Array (VLA) were brought into play, we began to get a sense of the very large scale of the universe, and were able to map galaxy locations by their radio-frequency output, like in this image, where each dot is a galaxy. We can see the galaxies tending not to be uniformly distributed, but gathering in clumps, along tendrils, and around bubbles of empty space. That’s what the wispy shapes in the cone are meant to represent: a longer-range view of the sort of shapes seen in the image I linked to in this paragraph.

At the time these sorts of maps were starting to get made, the clumps made no sense, because that would imply that the early universe was not uniform in terms of density, whereas every measurement yet made of the leftover Big Bang radiation, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), suggested uniform density, because it seemed to be exactly the same in all parts of he sky. Eventually, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) probe was sent up to measure the CMB with never-before-achieved accuracy, and gave us a crude temperature map of the sky, revealing that, yes, there were variations in the temperature which would account for the variations in density which would account for the non-uniform distribution of galaxies, which clump in the warmer areas, and are rare in the cold areas. Problem solved.

So then the WMAP probe, much like COBE but with even more sensitive instruments, was sent up to give us as detailed a picture as possible of the temperature variations throughout the sky.

Which brings us to the big black spot in the cone picture, the one that is so very much huger than all the normal-sized gaps we have come to expect. WMAP says everything in that area is cold. The VLA says radio waves are scarce from that place. That’s two systems, designed to measure different aspects of the universe, both suggesting there’s a big black pit of nothingness out there, bigger than any gap of which we’ve ever been able to conceive.

Actually, some Galactic entity probably just set up a Somebody Else’s Problem field around whatever’s “not there”…

I think it’s a Vogon Constructor Fleet on their way to Earth…

Hey, has anyone checked on what the Straumli Realm’s High Lab guys are up to lately? Their last press release was a month ago, and it seemed a bit - I dunno, “off”.

There’s another big hole in the sky (Google Sky, that is) Censorship in Google Sky? See new Sky Forum - Google Earth Blog

We are still bouncing through Relay, aren’t we? You can never quite tell, what with all the translations and all…

Finally, a place where I can get away from it all.