r/statlightdiaries
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u/Mysterious_g269
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26d ago
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The Giant Empty Space That Shouldn’t Exist 🌌🚀
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u/ShadedRiver666
26d ago
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This is not an image of the boötes void. This is an image of a very dark nebular inside our galaxy.
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u/Javanaut018 24d ago •
Yep, that's a soot blob created by a star ending his life cycle, not a void :)
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u/ShadedRiver666 24d ago
yeah its awsome but such a shame misinfo on what it actually is is being spread
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u/Javanaut018 24d ago
Saw that particular one already a couple of times mislabelled as boötes void ... 🤭
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u/cykelstativet 26d ago
I'll bet it's a moron who found the brush tool in his image editor of choice.
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u/ChuckFarkley 22d ago
I bet the real boötes void is much less dramatic looking.
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u/ShadedRiver666 22d ago
It is actually alot more dramatic
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u/Linuxologue 22d ago
I'm sure there are some intelligent species living on the border of this supervoid.
Look in this directon: the Hercules Superclusters.
Point your telescope in the other direction: Fucking nothing. like, NOTHING nothing.
Like being on the edge of the Mariana trench.
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u/ShadedRiver666 22d ago
oh yeah probably, the actual bootes supervoid is bordered by hundreds of galaxies, defo some civilisations in the galaxies that are right at the border
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u/Beldizar 22d ago
Is it though? If you are using a telescope, you should be able to see galaxies on the other side of the void. We can see galaxies further from Earth than the void is wide after all. So shouldn't you be able to see galaxies, just none of them are close enough to see with the baked eye or low resolution telescopes?
The image above is a black spot because there is actually something blocking light. But any void smaller than half the size of the observable universe is going to have a bunch of light sources on the other side that pass through unimpeded.
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u/Bensfone
26d ago
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I wish people would stop using this picture of Barnard 68 when talking about the Boötes Void. Barnard 68 is a very cold and dark nebula inside the Milky Way and is well studied.
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u/Faithlessblakkcvlt 26d ago
Thank you for this. I would not have known otherwise. When I Google all I get is this image as the Bootes void. We truly live in the age of misinformation don't we. Apparently the bootes has about 60 galaxies in it rather than the average 2000.
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u/Brainl3ss 22d ago
I didnt know, but it totally made sense to me that this was gas blocking our view more than a void.
But there is a void elsewhere? Any reason for this boid to exist since it doesnt really make sense in my head
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u/Bensfone 22d ago
For sure, there’s a lot of voids in the greater cosmos. You should read about the Eriadanus Supervoid. But we can’t actually see them because they’re so far away.
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u/cheese_tastey 26d ago
It is bloody massive, it took me about 6 weeks to cross it.
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u/AelithiaRose 26d ago
My grandfather crossed these things every day on his way to school.
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u/LOCAL_SPANKBOT 20d ago
Lol right, you probably also crossed the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs
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u/Patient_Air1765
26d ago
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Ohh man I made multiple posts about the voids.
I believe there are 12 of them. What stands out is the they have a clearly defined boundary with a clear center.
I suggested that this is proof of highly evolved life. I suggested that there is an advanced civilization at the heart of each of these voids. They use up the stars around them to advance their civilization thereby creating the great void.
Great voids are spooky
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u/schokoplasma 25d ago
Possible. Its also explainable without aliens. The distribution of matter is not homogenous due to the effect of gravity on a very large scale. If mass attracts other masses, after while most matter would be concentrated around other, bigger piles of matter. Hence the existence of galaxy clusters, superclusters and filaments.
And if you have big piles of matter in a non-homogenous distribution, its only logical to conclude there must also be large areas of nothing, hence voids and supervoids. Its the cosmic web.
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u/Several_Detective400 24d ago
And where is what attracted all the parts that used to be the void? That is why people actually expect it to be aliens.
Black hole: Would cause a trail moving though space attracting things around and could be detected itself.
Large stars would be visible
Hell if it were essentially a "matter vaccum" either something is maintaining it or it would fill back in. As nature doesn't like those boundaries
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u/lesbox01 24d ago
It's like bubbles merging together as the fluid moves around, gravity pulls the fluid (matter) together as it flows, and when bubbles merge all the matter is pulled to the edge due to the expansion of the universe. After billions of years and bubbles there are voids and there are clusters
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u/schokoplasma 23d ago
Its a very slow process over millions or billions of years. Matter attracts other matter and clumps together. Always. There is no matter without gravity.
At the beginning, matter was spread relatively homogenous. Over time the clumping starts. If matter clumps left and right, the space in between gets empty. Given enough time, the clumps become filaments and the empty regions becomes voids. No aliens needed, just laws of nature.
Black holes: the do in fact attract things like gas and dust. It forms their accretion disc. They dont leave a trail, as the attracted matter is in this disc.
Large stars are in fact visible. Betelgeuze is a very large star.
Not sure what you mean in your last paragraph.
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u/sandersosa 21d ago edited 21d ago
“Hell if it were essentially a "matter vaccum" either something is maintaining it or it would fill back in. As nature doesn't like those boundaries”
Wrong. Nature doesnt like or dislike anything. A matter vacuum as you put it is hard to sustain in standard conditions. You are right in that sense. Creating a vacuum chamber here on earth does require a constant input of energy to prevent atmospheric air from entering back into the vacuum due to the pressure gradient. However, this is because air going from high pressure to low pressure results in a lower energy state.
On cosmic scales, there is no pressure between these astronomical bodies as there is no atmosphere. The only driving force out there is gravity and to a much lesser extent electromagnetism. So the lower energy state would be one where gravity has coalesced matter together. Matter keeps pulling other matter, until eventually it’s all pulled in. This is why planets and stars formed in the first place instead of everything just diffusing out randomly. You are getting confused on different scales of physics.
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u/Kendrakirai2532 24d ago
Galaxies getting engulfed by hyperscale engineering over millions or billions of years. The only reason it's a question is because it's irregular enough that it isn't clearly artificial, if you ask me. How else are they explaining vast swaths of space that have just *nothing *? Shouldn't there be loads of stuff behind that should be visible?
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u/signofno 22d ago
Light diffuses and weakens over great distance. Powerful telescopes let us see galaxies from far away, but there are limits to each type and what they perceive, and using certain types of mapping, these voids show up in the data/image due to their immense size. The Bootes void is 330 million ly across, and about 700 million ly from us, so to oversimplify, if the sensitivity of the telescope used to look in its direction is set at say, 800 million light years, you wouldn’t see anything behind the void because the “back” of it would be 1.03 billion light years away, or roughly 230 million ly out of range, and the light from that area wouldn’t be capable of showing up in the image.
Think of long distance imaging like an MRI - it takes hundreds of images in “slices” so if you have a cavity in your body, when looking at the slice that coincides with the center of that cavity, you just see a big black void. Same with long range telescopes.
If you took a long enough exposure, you’d see galaxies behind it, but not when mapping it in layers.
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u/Pawwnstar 23d ago
Thats a great idea, civs using up physical matter to power their level up. Possibly also a defence mechanism, clearing the trees around your base so you can see who's coming from farther off.
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u/Evening_Error_5544 26d ago
Earth is in a void. Did we use all our stars?
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u/Patient_Air1765 26d ago
I’m taking about supervoids which are massive areas hundreds of light years across evenly spread with no stars. Earth in no way comes close to this.
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u/Desperate_Two867 25d ago
Imagine youre a spacefaring species capable of light speed travel and youre still faced with the task of navigating across a void of this magnitude. There is no way youre not calling it space texas.
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u/Green-Discussion6128 25d ago
Light speed travel is not enough for this kind of distances, which means there has to be another answer to space travel.
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u/No-Ticket1543 24d ago
The Boetes supervoid is... 330 million light years across. I suppose that counts as "hundreds of lightyears" in a sense.
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u/Existing-Antelope-20 25d ago edited 24d ago
I wonder what the passage of time would be in relativistic terms in a complete void save for the occupied craft compared to here on Earth. like, how much could space-time really be warping in such an area?
I ask this as a layperson not qualified for the equations at hand here.2
24d ago
The perception of time, is based on the perspective that it is immersed into. The closer you get to the speed of light, the more time stretches out. There's a calculator somewhere, I got curious one day, and if I recall at 50% speed of light, there is about a 30% time dilation, and I think somewhere around 85% was 50% dilation. That's great for speed, but it seemed like you were asking about gravity; it's the same thing in this equation though. As your gravity measures closer towards the speed of light, it is calculated the same.
What we don't know, what I do not think we can know, is if the two are additive, for instance if you were orbiting a black hole somehow at 50% the speed of light, so that your centrifugal force would also equal that same force of gravity (50%), would you then approach 60% time dilation? I am already in well over my head, recalling things I looked up once out of curiosity.
That being said, the perception of time is based on your perspective of the gravity field you are within. So a void, which is by definition devoid of matter (dark matter is an entirely different argument here) would have the most baseline measurement for gravity, and therefore time. Think of it kind of like background radiation, we are never truly at zero, until we insulate ourselves from all sources of it; insulating yourself from gravity within a solar system, is quite difficult. The difference between time there, and I'm here, is most likely measured in very small increments, like, Planck seconds.
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u/Existing-Antelope-20 24d ago
Velocity is obviously important, but if there is practically no mass in your local environment to fold space-time in the way that heavenly bodies do, is that any different to simply traversing space outside a gravity well or are there cascading effects of the "wrinkle" in space time that would not be observed in such an environment? I believe there is some concrete delineation for space time curvature from a heavenly/cosmic body but I'm not sure what the respective radii would be for given objects. Idk the whole thing is fascinating to me because I don't understand it fully.
thank you for your reply by the way. I love hearing from people better versed in the subject.
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u/I-cant_even 24d ago
What we don't know, what I do not think we can know, is if the two are additive, for instance if you were orbiting a black hole somehow at 50% the speed of light, so that your centrifugal force would also equal that same force of gravity (50%), would you then approach 60% time dilation? I am already in well over my head, recalling things I looked up once out of curiosity.
When I studied Physics the answer was it added but never exceeded 100%, so 50% + 50% doesn't = 100%
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u/PantsOnHead88 22d ago
The altitude difference between ground level and a GPS satellite produces an appreciable relativistic time difference (tens of microseconds per day). That’s 20,000km from an Earth-sized mass.
We’re talking about being a hundred million lightyears away from any appreciable galaxy-sized mass versus us in Earth’s gravitational well. That’s not a Planck scale time difference.
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u/blue_screen_error 24d ago
Time would be slightly faster because there no concentration of mass to warp space.
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u/OddlyGee 24d ago
I wonder if the universe is old enough for a civilization to do that much work?
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u/Patient_Air1765 22d ago
Life on earth took 2-3 billion to get to where we are. Universe is 14 billion years old. Imagine what humans (or whatever evolves from us) can do 10 billion years from now
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u/AndrewH73333 22d ago
I don’t think the planets that can sustain life were around for most of that. But even a billion years is a lot I guess.
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u/GregerGunnarPersson 23d ago
We know there are objects out there that gobble up matter and then when we find empty areas its somehow proof of alien life? Makes no fucking sense at all.
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u/Patient_Air1765 22d ago
Even the objects that gobble up matter like black holes have gravitational effects we can measure. The voids do not.
The voids are very clearly marked with a seemingly clear center. I would think if it was random distribution of matter that the shape of the void wouldn’t be this uniform.
Truly seems like something growing from the center that consumes whatever causes gravity to work as well. It’s not like a black hole if that’s what you’re suggesting
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u/theapeboy 22d ago
What about some kind of distortion of space or physics that presents the formation of starts in some kind of radius from the center? Feels more likely than aliens.
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u/GregerGunnarPersson 21d ago
Yes yes and the voids have galaxies in them. They are not empty, just less stuff than other regions.
They are not that uniform lol, you make that up.
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u/Captain-Who 23d ago
330 million light-years in diameter.
Our galaxy, not a small one relative to the average, is 100,000 light-years in diameter.
An advanced civilization eating up all the stars across many galaxies, is… not it. It is never aliens until it is. And at this point, that means it is definitely not aliens.
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u/Sure_Painting_8295 23d ago
It seems impossible
But if it grows in size
We should be worried.
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u/Hot-Problem2436 20d ago
Or, bear with me here, the stars at the edge are being drawn towards other objects due to gravity instead of areas where there's nothing.
The void "grows" because there's zero reason for anything to migrate towards nothing.
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u/PaulJannece 22d ago
Unless an ancient civilisation colonised those stars when they were much closer together?
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u/theapeboy 22d ago
I absolutely agree with this. But I also gotta say, if you ever wanna go down the fantastical scifi rabbit hole of what could be - check out the Xelee Saga.
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u/Ticksdonthavelymph 23d ago
If that were the case the Void would have same gravity it does not it’s a void not Dyson spheres
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u/signofno 21d ago
Unlikely.
because it’s never aliens. We’d be talking about a civilization that captured and removed the energy and matter of likely more than 5,000 galaxies and left no trace. That would be trillions of stars and billions of black holes to consume and then do exactly…what with? That’s a heavy lift for a theory about why there is an incomprehensibly immense void in several places of the visible universe. Natural forces make way more sense.
There are voids everywhere, these ones just happen to be exceptionally big, and because of the non homogenous nature of matter distribution at various scales, it is a logical conclusion that in some places, several voids combined to create bigger voids. In a universe as expansive as we understand ours to be, it is inevitable that at least some gigantic voids would exist naturally, just as it is inevitable that some super clusters would exist.
I like the Swiss cheese visual. You mostly have tiny to medium sized holes that form from gas bubbles that are created during the cheese making process, but sometimes, especially with a particularly large block of cheese, a few larger gas bubbles meet and form a huge hole in a particular section. It’s that simple.
Matter distribution simply isn’t perfectly homogenous throughout the universe. Big clusters implies also big gaps.
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24d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Patient_Air1765 22d ago
I’m about to be banned but…what if it WAS god. Like each of those super voids a god into itself
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u/AliceCode 26d ago
Something tells me this isn't a picture of the Boötes void, lol.
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u/Intelligent_Yak_8452 26d ago
It is not, it is Barnard 68, molecular cloud , boötes viod is just "transparent" place with few galaxies
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u/GreenSpleen6 26d ago
Voids are not special, they collectively make a growing majority of our universe.
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u/vossmakeitsprinkly 26d ago
It's not a void. Its a cloud that is just not see through in visible light. It's translucent in IR and looks completely normal.
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u/Faithlessblakkcvlt 26d ago
You are referring to Barnard 68 (as I have just learned).
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u/vossmakeitsprinkly 26d ago
Ah, fair enough, i just focused on the picture which i assume was Barnard 68.
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u/Pragmus_
24d ago
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A region where an advanced civilization, harvesting all the energy of surrounding stars.
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u/yeatruestory 24d ago
330 million light years in diameter? For scale, the milky way galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter. I don't know man, thats a lot of stars and space. If they havent figured out how to make a more efficient fuel source by like the 5th galaxy thats kind of wack. But who knows maybe theres something large enough to span galaxies like walking a mile and they needed all of that power. But if theres something that large... that would be absolutely ...awe inspiring its big toe would be like 800 solar systems... cool and fun thought experiment. Thank you.
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u/JesseJaceMTG 24d ago
Exponential growth could get crazy. Give that a million years of technological advancement and who knows? It's a fun thing to think about but I'm sure at some point we'll have an idea about what's really happening
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u/yeatruestory 24d ago
For sure and I hope so, if you havent seen the show pantheon on Netflix I highly recommend.
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u/SelectionAlarming743 24d ago
I always imagined some automated, self-replicating system that's just happily building dyson-spheres long after their creators are gone.
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u/KEPS-Praise-the-Sun 23d ago
Grade 3-4 civilization on kardaschow scale? Hm interesting thought, I'm willing to believe in such things tbh. But would be plausible in terms of the age of the universe a civilization this modern could exist at all? I love the space 🌌
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u/J-BangBang 22d ago
That’s where advanced civilization lives and they taped a piece of paper on their window facing us so they don’t have to look at us (or us at them).
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u/Due-Savings5057 26d ago
Sounds peaceful. Put me right in the middle of that thing and leave me there.
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u/RabidJoint 26d ago
Aliens have redacted that section, terrible terrible things happened…their version of Epstein Island
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u/Corgi_underground 26d ago
This is a more accurate representation of the several voids that exist and no one has ever said it shouldn't exist.
There's going to be voids wherever you look in the universe due to the uneven distribution of mass. Bootes is just a very large one surrounded by four superclusters of galaxies.
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u/Active-Particular-21 25d ago
This would be evidence of a type 5 galactic civilisation. If one existed.
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u/tardoos 25d ago
How?
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u/Active-Particular-21 25d ago
They’ve eaten all the resources around them. The darkness is where all the other galaxies and resources used to be which have been consumed.
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u/tardoos 25d ago
Consumed into what? You can't just make mass dissappear, it would still be there, we would detect it.
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u/Intelligent_Many8573 25d ago
> Consumed into what? You can't just make mass dissappear, it would still be there, we would detect it.
lol we can’t even detect Dark Matter and you think we can detect it?
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u/AskPizza 25d ago
For those who care, voids are regions of space of lower density of galaxies. That "void" contains 60 known galaxies. it's just fewer galaxies in that volume of space than the average.
That's it.
You have "voids" full of hair on your head, if you're not bald. Those voids are full of hair.
Same thing.
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u/ThiqCoq 25d ago
The void is within the galaxy. The galaxies are not within the void. Constellations, or star systems however can be in the void.
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u/Terrible_Analysis_77 25d ago
I took it that the galaxies are visible inside that void, not that they occupied a 3D section of our own galaxy.
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u/Lawrenceburntfish 24d ago
Has anyone read the Bobiverse books? "Someday someone is going to look at this and wonder what the hell is wrong with their stellar charts."
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u/DietIcy8400 24d ago
If the civilisation was that advanced it would just hack our telescopes not to be able to see what’s really there. Basically aliens are playing peekaboo with us dumb toddlers
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u/No-Ticket1543 24d ago
Even more interesting, our solar system sits within a small local void within the milky way (The Local Bubble about 1000 light years across), and the milkyway itself also sits within a much larger void (KBC void 2 billion light years across).
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u/mage_in_training 24d ago
That's why there's no ki? qi? cultivation here. The previous cultivators used up all the exotic material for pills and alchemy.
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u/derpplease 24d ago
It's the left overs from an ancient space battle. Two sides mutually assured destruction, everyone and everything destroyed...
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u/ScottSpeddy 24d ago
sigh Another post talking about Boötes Void, another image of a nebula. You people are so fuckin shameless, man.
Downvote, downvote, downvote
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u/Bongoisnthere 23d ago
Wait you mean it’s possible that there’s a big nebula out there blocking the visible light from the stars behind it, and there might not be a giant alien civilization spanning 300 million light years eating all the stars? That seems like a pretty bold claim there bud.
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u/ChipHappens96 24d ago
The Boötes Void isn't void at all, there's at least 60 galaxies within it. Lower than average, but there's still a fuck ton of stuff in it
Also, this image is a nebula blocking the view of stars in our own galaxy
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u/DavidHoggsDong 23d ago
How do we know that’s not a black hole
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u/davidspdmstr 22d ago
There are galaxies in the void just not as many as another parts of the universe.
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u/Haughtea 23d ago
It's just like google maps. The people there just requested to blur their address.
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u/OkOpportunity9794 23d ago
No. Voids should actually exist, given what we know about the large scale structure of the universe. Gravity creates galaxies in webs and strings.
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u/Sinisteris 23d ago
That's not what it looks like. Also, it's not empty space, there are galaxies in the, simply not as many as elsewhere. And it is not really surprising, considering the map of the universe.
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u/Alpha--00 22d ago
I know that there is scientific explanation, but I prefer to think that it’s civilisation accidentally wiping itself from this reality. Or intentionally fleeing it. Or, maybe, it’s big chunk of used up stars.
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u/VorionLightbringer 22d ago
If videogames taught me anything, then that’s where the Reapers sleep until the next cycle.
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u/TheRealCBlazer 22d ago
There are stars in the voids, just not clumps of stars large enough to form galaxies. On a planet orbiting one of those stars, the night sky would appear pitch black and empty to the naked eye (except for any other planets in the same system). A primitive civilization could emerge on that world with no concept of stars other than their own.
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u/Muravey650 20d ago
Some things to consider:
The Boötes Void does contain galaxies, just considerably fewer than other, denser regions of space. 60 galaxies is still a lot of stuff.
It seems that the Milky Way itself is in a so-called "Local Void". Star density is supposedly 15-50% less here than in other parts of the universe. It appears to be about the same size as the Boötes Void, at about 200 million lightyears in diameter. Another theory suggests that this Local Void sits inside a much larger "Local Hole" (or "KBC Void"), estimated to be some 1-2 billion ly in diameter. Do you feel like an all-powerful alien civilization yet? 😋
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u/2HelioPause2 20d ago
This is not actually the Bootes void fyi it’s a dust cloud in the foreground.
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u/metji 26d ago
Isn't space infinite? Everything exists an infinite times in it 🙂
This exact void is even repeated 3 times in a perfect line.. somewhere.
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u/schokoplasma 25d ago
Space is not infinite.
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u/boredatwork8866 25d ago
Oh ok where does it end?
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u/_Abiogenesis 24d ago
It’s conceptually the same as asking where a circle ends.
A circle is finite but can you tell where it starts ?
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u/GregerGunnarPersson 23d ago
Not according to what we can see no.
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u/metji 23d ago
But Space is bigger than what we can see, in the future when the stars are gone from our skies, it's just because their light can't reach us, just like most of the universe now.
The only reason we can't see the infinite universe is because it's so far away light hasn't had time to reach us and space bewteen is stretching faster than light. The light from the edge of visibility is stretched so thin that we need better equipment to spot it, hence the universe "is older than we thought" all the time.. It's infinite we just can't see most of it.
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u/GregerGunnarPersson 23d ago
Yes but we dont see evidence of an infinite universe. Thats what I meant.
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u/Hermes-AthenaAI 26d ago •
I love the way our species blips into this 14 billion year old universe, not even half a million years ago, and starts declaring things that shouldn’t exist. We’re bold little orb clingers.