The void around the Milky Way spans a billion light years.
The hole that houses the Milky Way is the largest in the universe. American astronomers Ben Hoscheit and Amy Barger from the University of Wisconsin at Madison announced this at a conference of the American Astronomical Society (AAS).
Void - this is how, in scientific terms, this huge empty space is called, which scientists talk about. It reaches a billion light-years across.
The universe, which should be homogeneous, is not really homogeneous
Voids larger than ours cannot be seen in the Universe, although it is all woven from clumps of galactic clusters and voids hundreds of millions of light years in length.
In general, the Universe - with its nodes-clusters and connections between them - is surprisingly similar to a neural network, which seems to be inside someone's infinitely large head.
In theory, clusters and voids should be evenly distributed. As in the head. That is, the universe is supposed to be homogeneous. Like a neural network. However, there are super-star clusters - galactic clusters and even super-clusters. There are also giant voids - voids. And this is a mystery.
The structure of the universe (right) resembles the neural network of the brain (left). They differ only in scale
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Some force is pushing the Milky Way so that it rushes somewhere with great speed
It seems that our galaxy will not be in the void until the end of time. Someday he will get out of it. After all, the Milky Way flies somewhere into the depths of the Universe, accelerating to 2 million kilometers per hour.
For more than 30 years, it has been generally accepted that our galaxy - the Milky Way - is being pulled in its direction by the Great Attractor. He is the Great Center of Attraction, which is located in the constellation of the Angle. And it is a galactic supercluster of unprecedented size - a million billion times heavier than the Sun and tens of thousands of times more massive than the Milky Way.
The Milky Way does not stand still in its emptiness
However, recent observations have shown that our and neighboring galaxies and even galaxy clusters are influenced by at least one other object. It does not pull like the Great Attractor, but rather pushes. Only on the other side. Astronomers from Israel, France and the United States, conducting research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, called the "pusher" the Dipole Repeller. Or Dipole Repeller. He, according to scientists, is also a gigantic area of empty space. That is, in the vicinity of our hole - on one side there is a galactic node, and on the other - some other hole.
VLADIMIR LAGOVSKY