Another week , another viral Emily Post misrepresenting space . This meter it ’s the turn of Barnard 68 , which – if the net is to be believed ( which it ’s not ) – is " an empty emptiness in space so big that if you travel across it you would n’t bump into anything for 752,536,988 years " .
While it ’s smart not to specify a fastness ( hey , it ’s technically true that if you traveled at a few meter a year you probably would n’t chance into anything in 752,536,988 eld ) , this is definitely not the face .
What you ’re seeing above is areal imageof the dingy nebula Bernard 68 , which is so close ( 400 light - year ) that nothing can be go steady between it and the Sun , take by the European Southern Observatory ’s ( ESO ) Very Large Telescope in March 1999 . However , it is absolutely crammed full of stars , even if you ca n’t see them when imaging the area using seeable twinkle , thanks to the molecular swarm . AsESO explains , " at these wavelengths , the pocket-sized cloud is wholly unintelligible because of the obscuring effect of dust particles in its Department of the Interior . "
A composite image of Barnard 68. Center, colored in red, shows the area imaged in infrared light. Image credit:ESO
If you picture it in infrared , here add up the stars .
As IFLScience’sFrancesca Bensonput it , saying that this is a void in space because you ca n’t see past the black nebula is like claiming the Sun does not exist because clouds .
But fans of big eldritch voids in space , do not despair , for there are mass of mysteries out there in the sempiternal sweep of the universe .
The Great Nothing: an actual void in space
The Boötes void , often referred to as the Great Nothing or the Great Void , is an actual area of space with fewer galaxies than you ’d gestate . At 250 to 330 million abstemious - years across , it is one of the declamatory void that we know of . To put that in context , that ’s about2 percent of the diameter of the entire discernible world .
The void was firstdiscovered in 1981 , in the path of a redshift view of galaxy . release their results in apapertitled " A million three-dimensional megaparsec nothingness in Boötes ? " , stargazer noted that one plausible rendering of the datum they had collected was that the area is " nearly devoid of galaxies . "
lento , uranologist began to discover galaxies in the realm , and by 1997 around 60 galaxy had been sustain in theGreat Nothingin an area that should contain approximately 2,000 galax ( if place was that uniform ) . While there is little about the void to suggest our idea about beetleweed organisation is wrong – one potential explanation is that it constitute from smaller voids coming together – it is still an funny thought experimentation to picture how someone inside the void must see the world .
As astronomerGreg Aldering put it : " If the Milky Way had been in the center of the Boötes void , we would n’t have known there were other galaxies until the 1960s . ”
