I's Got Plenty Of Nothing

A Billion Billion Billion Cubic Light-Year Blank

Extragalactic Radio Sources     and the WMAP Cold Spot

a paper that is to appear soon in The Astrophysical Journal by  astrophysicists  Lawrence Rudnick , Shea Brown,and Liliya R. Williams of the U.Minn Department of Astronomy,  reports that  the WMAP microwave background spacecraft has  detected a void in the  universe a billion light years across --

"Our results suggest that the dip in extragalactic brightness and number counts and the WMAP cold spot are physically related, i.e., that the coincidence is neither a statistical anomaly nor a WMAP foreground correction problem... To create the magnitude and angular size of the WMAP cold spot requires a 140 Mpc radius completely empty void... far outside the current expectations of the concordance cosmology, and adds to the anomalies seen in the Cosmic Microwave Background"  Its discovery began as a blank spot in radio telescope maps, but optical surveys saw neither galaxies or stars, and x-ray  telescopes no sign of blackholes, quasars,or even dark matter.

''This is 1,000 times the volume of what we sort of expected to see in terms of a typical void,''   Rudnick told The New York Times  ''It's not clear that we have the right word yet ... This is too much of a surprise.''

The Times reports Rudnick was examining a sky survey from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which essentially takes radio pictures of a broad expanse of the universe. But one area of the universe had radio pictures indicating there was up to 45 percent less matter in that region...The rest of the matter in the radio pictures can be explained as stars and other cosmic structures between here and the void, which is about 5 to 10 billion light years away.

Rudnick then checked observations of cosmic microwave background radiation and found a cold spot. The only explanation, Rudnick said, is it's empty of matter.It could also be a statistical freak of nature, but that's probably less likely than a giant void, said James Condon, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Comments

[Robert Speirs]

How can there be an expanse of nothing? If two objects have nothing between them, aren't they touching each other?

[Janice Damon]

maybe it is related to the picture we say of the clumping of dark matter in the beginning of the formation of the universe? The universe is created of 4 basic buiding parts 1. matter thater is made of electons that we say have a "-" charge and protons that have a "+" charge, and neutrons [at the most basic structural concept]
2. energy, which is caused and detected by the movement of these "-" charged electrons. I will stop here to mention that we know we can exchage M and E. We did not know that 100 years ago. "Matter couild neither be created nor destroyed" was a law I remember hearing. Now we know that there are such thins as anti-matter or "dark" matter and anti or "dark" energy. Is it possible that this energy, matter that we are now becoming familiar with is simply the counterpart to our matter with the opposite spin in the electon clouds thus making the electons "+" and the protons"-". This would make all the energy imposible to detect with our instrments due to the fact that they all are set to detect electronegative radiation, IV, IR, Vis,. The "cold or "heat" and the indirect detection methods (we are familiar with for dark matter) would be the only clues that we have.(?) If there is a trasition point for E to M then it stand to reason that there must be transformation positions for dark matter to matter (scafolding we saw at the hubble "clumping picture?)and matter and energy to dark energy, and dark matter. I do not feel information is lost at a black hole. I believe the possiblility that the black hole may be a devise of not destruction but of reconstruction or recycling. I have no math major just a chemisrty degree. I offer no proof. I ask only a question.?

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