I wanted to find something big and spectacular for my first posting to this blog and this story seems to fit both bills. It’s as big as anything I can think of that science has come up with so far and your humble moderator’s mind keeps trying to wrap itself around it, and of course, failing.

The New Scientist website reported on 24 August 2007 that there’s a void in space, 6 to 10 billion light years from Earth that stretches across a billion empty light years of absolute nothingness from the direction of the constellation Eridanus. According to Lawrence Rudnick and colleagues at the University of Minnesota, there are no radio waves coming from this area of space, meaning no galaxies, no super clusters, stars or even dark matter, though he seems to think that this is confirmation of dark energy in the universe.

But another team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill suggests that the incredible void may be the imprint of another universe on our own. Also reported in New Scientist, on 24 November 2007, Laura Mersini-Houghton and her team infer that this might also vindicate string theory.

According to the New Scientist article, “In string theory, 10500 universes (or string vacuums) are described, each with unique properties. They contend that the largeness of our universe is due to its vacuum counterbalancing gravity. This counter-gravity of the vacuum keeps our universe very large (rather than shrinking due to gravity)—larger than the other multitude of universes. The team says that smaller universes are positioned at the edge of our universe, and because of this interaction they are seen by us.”

This is one reason to watch astronomy closely in the future and we’ll try to keep a close eye on it on this blog. A billion light years across. wowser.

What can your moderator say? Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proofs.