![kbc void kbc void](https://share.worldapi.kes.kano.me/1755937895711037364/cover.png)
“They show us that at that stage, the Universe was surprisingly homogeneous. “Photons from the CMB encode a baby picture of the very early Universe,” Hoscheit said. The bright light from a supernova explosion, where the distance to the galaxy that hosts the supernova is well established, is the ‘candle’ of choice for astronomers measuring the accelerated expansion of the Universe.īecause those objects are relatively close to the Milky Way and because no matter where they explode in the observable Universe, they do so with the same amount of energy, it provides a way to measure the Hubble constant.Īlternatively, the CMB is a way to probe the very early Universe. “It is often really hard to find consistent solutions between many different observations,” Dr. The new analysis shows that the team’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. To date, it is the largest void known to science. The KBC void is at least 7 times as large as the average. The filaments are made up of superclusters and clusters of galaxies, which in turn are composed of stars, gas, dust and planets.ĭark matter and dark energy, which cannot yet be directly observed, are believed to comprise 95% of the contents of the Universe.
![kbc void kbc void](https://www.mdpi.com/particles/particles-04-00002/article_deploy/html/images/particles-04-00002-g014.png)
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 new study is part of the much bigger effort to better understand the large-scale structure of the Universe. The reason for that is that a void - with far more matter outside the void exerting a slightly larger gravitational pull - will affect the Hubble constant value one measures from a technique that uses relatively nearby supernovae, while it will have no effect on the value derived from a technique that uses the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Fortunately, living in a void helps resolve this tension,” said Benjamin Hoscheit, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “No matter what technique you use, you should get the same value for the expansion rate of the Universe today. The tension arises from the realization that different techniques astrophysicists employ to measure how fast the Universe is expanding give different results. Their new study not only firms up this idea, but helps ease the apparent disagreement or tension between different measurements of the Hubble constant. Amy Barger and co-authors showed that the Milky Way resides in a fascinating two-billion light-year wide void, called the KBC void. In 2013, University of Wisconsin-Madison astronomer Dr. Image credit: Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics.
#Kbc void series
Matter in the Universe is arrayed on a series of filaments that surround vast voids. Each of the tiniest of the dots denotes an entire galaxy. This image portrays a simulation of the Universe.