Is This The Creepiest Place In The Universe?
It can be foreboding to think about the Universe. The infinite size and scope of everything we know in existence is beyond comprehension, and in between the awe-inspiring planets, stars, and nebulae, there is a whole lot of nothing. According to Discovery, some parts of the universe are, to use a paradoxical term, filled with nothing, so utterly devoid of anything there's not even an atom for hundreds of trillions of miles: the great cosmic voids.
The Universe is organized into a web-like pattern, with clusters and long strands of glistening stars and galaxies. In between these cosmic strands and structures is absolute nothingness for millions of light-years, lacking planets, stars, nebulae, asteroids, even atoms. Some (on the smaller scale!) are around 20 million light-years wide, while others stretch across most of the known Universe. In fact, most of the Universe is made up of these voids, with all the matter in existence bundled together in the cosmic web, bordered by walls of complete, eerie nothingness.
Cosmic voids stem from the Big Bang
According to Universe Today, these creepy hollow gaps in the Universe stem all the way back to the Big Bang, the most likely theory for the creation of the Universe. The slightest deviations in density within the ball of superheated plasma that became the Universe were magnified over the 13 billion years since, to the point where what was once a microscopic anomaly now accounts for these vast oceans of stillness.
Galaxies tend to form in walls, with thousands of them connected through nodes stretching for millions of light-years. Some of these regions are not completely empty, however, but there is still uncertainty. Gases and dust might wander through, and there's the possibility that the cosmic voids are filled with dark matter — if dark matter even exists. Some of these voids are so large that there are even galaxy clusters within them. There's a lot left to learn about our Universe, even the cold dark voids of eerie emptiness.