Far out cosmology:MilkyWay in a big void (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, June 07, 2017, 05:20 (2725 days ago) @ dhw

This is another special aspect of our galaxy. living in a giant void in the Swiss cheese of a universe:

https://phys.org/news/2017-06-celestial-boondocks-idea-void.html

"Cosmologically speaking, the Milky Way and its immediate neighborhood are in the boondocks

"In a 2013 observational study, University of Wisconsin-Madison astronomer Amy Barger and her then-student Ryan Keenan showed that our galaxy, in the context of the large-scale structure of the universe, resides in an enormous void—a region of space containing far fewer galaxies, stars and planets than expected.

"Now, a new study by a UW-Madison undergraduate, also a student of Barger's, not only firms up the idea that we exist in one of the holes of the Swiss cheese structure of the cosmos, but helps ease the apparent disagreement or tension between different measurements of the Hubble Constant, the unit cosmologists use to describe the rate at which the universe is expanding today.

***

"The new Wisconsin report is part of the much bigger effort to better understand the large-scale structure of the universe. The structure of the cosmos is Swiss cheese-like in the sense that it is composed of "normal matter" in the form of voids and filaments. The filaments are made up of superclusters and clusters of galaxies, which in turn are composed of stars, gas, dust and planets. Dark matter and dark energy, which cannot yet be directly observed, are believed to comprise approximately 95 percent of the contents of the universe.

"The void that contains the Milky Way, known as the KBC void for Keenan, Barger and the University of Hawaii's Lennox Cowie, is at least seven times as large as the average, with a radius measuring roughly 1 billion light years. To date, it is the largest void known to science. Hoscheit's new analysis, according to Barger, shows that Keenan's first estimations of the KBC void, which is shaped like a sphere with a shell of increasing thickness made up of galaxies, stars and other matter, are not ruled out by other observational constraints."

Comment: Our galaxy has life. We don't want lots of dangerous stuff exploding round us and we don't want to run into another galaxy for some time. This void is protective. Currently we are scheduled to run into Andromeda in about two billion years. That alone could be destructible enough to destroy life before our sun expands and finishes Earth life five billion years from now. The time term for life in this arrangement is finite. Will that be the end of it or is there another solution God will present?