The universe is Swiss cheese not cream cheese, sort of

Black areas are huge voids in the universe 

The latest issue of Scientific American has an article, Cosmic Nothing, that discusses voids in various places in the universe. Vast increases in computing power and more sensitive instruments have recently knocked down big barriers to research in this area of cosmology. The article includes an amazing two full page map of the entire universe that shows the holes in the universe. This is the most striking science image I recall seeing in years.

The map of the universe shown below in separate images:

Gly = giga-light years

giga = billion or 10^9

The SciAm article comments: 

The discovery of cosmic voids in the late 1970s to mid-1980s came as something of a shock to astronomers, who were startled to learn that the universe didn't look the way they'd always thought. They knew that stars were gathered into galaxies and that galaxies often clumped together into clusters of dozens or even hundreds. But if you zoomed out far enough, they figured, this clumpiness would even out: at the largest scales the cosmos would look homogeneous. It wasn't just an assumption. The so-called cosmic microwave background (CMB)—electromagnetic radiation emitted about 380,000 years after the big bang—is extremely homogeneous, reflecting smoothness in the distribution of matter when it was created. And even though that was nearly 14 billion years ago, the modern universe should presumably reflect that structure.

Scientists have known since the 1980s that these fields of nothing exist, but inadequate observational data and insufficient computing power kept them from being the focus of serious research. Lately, though, the field has made tremendous progress, .... Within just a few years, [computational astrophysicist Alice Pisani, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York City] and an increasing number of scientists are convinced, the study of the universe's empty spaces could offer important clues to help solve the mysteries of dark matter, dark energy and the nature of the enigmatic subatomic particles called neutrinos. 

As later, deeper surveys would confirm, galaxies and clusters of galaxies are themselves concentrated into a gigantic web of concentrated regions of matter connected by streaming filaments, with gargantuan voids in between. In other words, the cosmos today vaguely resembles Swiss cheese, whereas the CMB looks more like cream cheese.

Final infobits: The Vera C. Rubin observatory is the main source for studying voids. It is on the Cerro Pachón mountain in Chile, elevation 9022.31 feet (2750 meters, 1.71 miles):

 

By Germaine: Interested in things ’n stuff