The Giant Void In The Milky Way — And The Terrifying Implications

When you look up into the night sky from anywhere on Earth, I’m willing to bet that on a clear night, you see stars. If you’re in a rural area, these stars are vibrant and cover the entire sky easily. That’s why right now, you’re probably wondering what ‘void’ I’m talking about.

This void was discovered a while back by scientists with telescopes, since it’s not exactly visible with the naked eye. As it turns out, the void is just a chunk of the milky way which has no young or new stars. Now, scientists have to reexamine how star distribution inside galaxies work. The Milky Way is home to anywhere between 100 billion — 400 billion stars, our Sun included. Earth is about 26,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way.

In order to calculate star distribution, scientists use a type of pulsating star known as a Cepheid. Cepheids pulsate in a pattern, and by using this and the brightness (as compared to our star), scientists are able to calculate redshift and distance from us. Additionally, from using cepheids, astrophysicists have been able to determine the shape of our galaxy — which actually is warped interestingly.

This image is the mapped version of the galaxy three dimensionally, which illustrates the galactic warp which appears in the Milky Way galaxy. This has entirely been determined by cepheid placement in the known galaxy.

So far all of this seems pretty normal, so where’s the void?

This is an image of the Milky Way, and the blue dots represent cepheids. The region in the inside without the dots is the void without cepheids.

In the center of the galaxy, in a region about 150 light years in radius, there are cepheids. Outside this, there’s a huge area completely devoid of cepheids from about 8,000 light years from the center. Scanning for stars isn’t easy. This is because there’s a lot of interstellar dust in the galaxy which can pretty easily block out stars. In order to compensate for this, the team ran scans with near-infrared light.

That’s when they discovered the region lacking cepheids. As Giuseppe Bono, a team member of the project explains, “The current results indicate that there has been no significant star formation in this large region over hundreds of millions of years,”. While Bono has a reasonable evaluation of the scans, therein still lies the question as to why no stars have formed in this region — and if they have, what happened to them.

Why Haven’t There Been Any Cepheids? — Personal Speculation

So the exact reason hasn’t been determined, but here’s a theory I’ve got on why that area doesn’t have any. It could possible have to do with one of a few factors:

• There’s something that prevents the creation of new Cepheids. As Bono explained, there’s been no real star formation for a significant point of time. This could be explained by something in that area of space preventing the creation of new stars.
• There’s something that disappears the Cepheids. Rather than simply being unable to create new Cepheids for billions of years, there could be something in that part of the galaxy that disappears all Cepheids. In this case, there’s likely a threat to other portions of the galaxy — or perhaps not, if the phenomena is well contained.

• There’s something different about that section of spacetime. This one could potentially be ruled out, as we do have substantial enough scientific instruments to analyze distortions in space time. Arguably, if we had truly had substantial enough instruments and there was indeed a distortion, we would have found it. However, may never know if there are spatial distortions and our instruments were never sufficient to pick them up.
• There’s some kind of dark matter, antimatter, or exotic particle there. We know our instruments likely wouldn’t pick up the unknown, so something like a blob of dark matter, or some antimatter generation method which prevents or cancels out the creation of the Cepheids.

Either way, the concept that there’s a blank area in space without any stars, whether or not we can see it from our backyards, is still pretty terrifying. Of course, there’s still room for a more reasonable explanation — but for right now, the explanation is still very much an unknown. As Yvon Chouinard once said,

Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all

We’re most affected by the unknown, most of all because of the size of the known and the enigmatic aurora which surrounds it. However, that’s not the only question scientists have about oddities in the night sky.

Our Galaxy Is Also Surrounded By A Void

Not only is the inside of the Milky Way home to a big void, but chances are we’re also surrounded by one. This is known as a Local Void, and likely surrounds the outside of the Milky Way galaxy. However, our galaxy tends to move towards areas with more density. As this happens, the Local Void progressively grows.

This is a diagram of our LV (Local Void) and out current potential movement towards other places with more density, planets, and suns.

Further away from our galaxy is a void, known as the Boötes Void, aptly nicknamed “The Great Nothing”. This is because it’s a huge spherical region of space which is home to very few galaxies. It’s one of the largest known voids in the universe, as well as consistent with the Lambda-CDM model. This is a cosmological theory which discusses the consistency of the universe into dark matter, dark energy, and regular matter.

It’s believed that the Boötes Void comes from multiple voids merging together, creating one ultimate void. In the middle of the void, there’s a cylindrical region in which the other galaxies reside. This would make sense, especially assuming that the other voids were likely their own spherical shapes which had the capabilities to come together.

Either way, it’s food for thought: how come there are places without Cepheids? What happened/is happening so that there consistently aren’t any more, especially in the space void in the Milky Way? Someday — and at that, perhaps someday in the near future — maybe we’ll have an answer!

Thank you for reading this article! I hope you learned a little something, or at least had fun reading it! Any questions, comments, topics you’d like to hear about,or anything else, email me at amesett@gmail.com or comment on this article! You can also find me on LinkedIn under Amelia Settembre!