Space Has An Empty Hole One Billion Light Years Across

There's that big hole now.

There's a great big hole in the universe with nothing in it and when I say nothing, I mean not even dark matter.

Radio astronomers have found this enormous gap, nearly a billion light years across and it's challenging the existing theories of how our universe was formed.

Lawrence Rudnick and colleagues of the University of Minnesota had been studying data from the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico, and discovered the void by accident. "One morning I was a little bored, and said, 'why don't I look in the direction of the WMAP cold spot'," says Rudnick.

The void, about 6 billion to 10 billion light years from us, is considerably larger than any found before. Until now, no voids larger than 80 megaparsecs wide have been found, making the new hole 40 times larger than any previously discovered.

Rudnick also believes this confirms the existence of dark matter. Head on over to the article in New Scientist to find out why.