This Is the Scariest Place in The Universe

0:01 The vast majority of the cosmos is voids.

0:05 Gigantic, unfathomably large spaces of empty nothingness.

0:10 Bubbles of eternal night, stretching hundreds of millions of light-years,

0:14 almost entirely devoid of galaxies, stars, or light.

0:20 The loneliest places in existence.

0:23 Voids are not just the absence of stuff

0:26 but weird worlds of darkness that are growing, drifting,

0:29 colliding and merging with each other– Inside them space itself

0:34 is stretched violently and it's almost impossible to enter them.

0:39 Simply put: voids are weird and scary.

0:43 But they sculpt the entire universe and may ultimately decide its fate.

0:49 Today we know of over 8,000 voids and supervoids, and we keep discovering more.

0:55 No matter how large a cluster or supercluster of galaxies gets,

1:00 there always seems to be an even larger void nearby.

1:04 Let’s jump off the cosmic cliff and drop into the heart of cosmic nothingness.

1:12 The Loneliest Place in the Universe You are zooming away from Earth,

1:17 at thousands of times the speed of light,

1:20 leaving our solar system and our solar neighborhood behind.

1:24 Now we see the entire Milky Way with its 200

1:26 billion stars and dozens of dwarf galaxies zipping around it.

1:30 2.5 million light-years away on a collision course is

1:33 giant Andromeda and its own swarm of satellite galaxies.

1:38 We are now moving a million times faster than the speed of light,

1:42 seeing the local group of over 50 galaxies woven together by gravity,

1:47 rivers of gas, and invisible scaffolds of dark matter.

1:52 This is our pocket of the universe,

1:55 10 million light years across, no human will ever leave it.

1:59 Except for you apparently.

2:02 As we zoom away even faster we see the Virgo Supercluster,

2:06 a colossal wall of more than 2,000

2:10 galaxies spread over roughly 100 million light-years.

2:13 Careful now, you are right on the edge of the cosmic cliff where the true,

2:17 deep darkness begins: the Local Void– a gigantic,

2:22 empty bubble 200 million light-years across.

2:25 If it was a bright thing and not absolute darkness,

2:28 it would fill 40% of the night sky we see from earth.

2:32 All around us are dozens of other

2:35 superclusters and gigantic voids filled with suffocating emptiness.

2:41 You are now traveling towards the greatest and emptiest nothing

2:45 in existence– right into the center of the Boötes Supervoid.

2:50 A cosmic desert around 300 million light-years wide.

2:55 So gigantic it should contain thousands of galaxies.

2:58 But instead, what do you see?

3:02 You are surrounded by perfect darkness,

3:05 the most absolute blackness the human mind can conceive.

3:09 There is no up or down.

3:11 No motion.

3:12 Nothing to orient yourself.

3:14 There is not a single sign that the outside universe even exists.

3:18 It’s an inescapable prison.

3:20 And this isn’t some exotic corner of the cosmos.

3:23 This is how the vast majority of the universe feels to human eyes.

3:28 Just silent blackness without any movement.

3:31 Everywhere.

3:32 Forever.

3:35 Although there is something mysterious hiding

3:37 in the dark– faint tendrils of dark matter,

3:40 penetrating into the void like cosmic lichen.

3:43 A miniature echo of the much larger forest of dark matter filaments

3:47 that forms the scaffold of galaxies and galaxy clusters outside the void.

3:52 And at their tips we find faint blueish specs in the ocean of darkness:

3:57 Void galaxies, lonely fireflies unable to light up the night.

4:02 The rarest galaxies we know, very isolated, very lonely.

4:08 A Universe of Bubbles Before we could look deep into space,

4:14 astronomers thought we lived in a uniform

4:16 cosmos with galaxies spread out evenly.

4:18 But instead, we found that galaxies,

4:20 cosmic gas and dark matter were arranged into a vast cosmic web.

4:25 A recurring pattern of sheets and filaments,

4:29 organized around enormous empty gaps,

4:31 meeting at dense knots with galaxy clusters and super clusters.

4:35 But this structure is not static, it just seems to be because

4:40 the distances between galaxies are so incredibly vast.

4:43 In reality galaxies shoot through space

4:45 at speeds of millions of kilometers per hour.

4:49 They are on collision courses, orbiting each other,

4:51 moving towards the center of larger

4:54 galaxy clusters millions of light years away.

4:56 But they always seem to stick to the rims of voids

4:59 like reflections of light on soap bubbles– which is kind of weird.

5:04 If they are this dynamic, shouldn’t a galaxy shoot into a void occasionally?

5:09 Well voids are actually extremely hard to enter

5:11 for galaxies from the outside– at least

5:14 naturally– because gravity becomes weird at their edges

5:17 and even weirder deeper inside them.

5:20 If you didn't know better,

5:21 you might think voids spit out anything trying to get inside,

5:25 pushing galaxies to the edge.

5:27 The way gravity works is that everything with mass

5:29 in the universe attracts every other thing with mass.

5:32 And since there is almost no mass inside,

5:35 the cosmic web of galaxy super clusters

5:37 on their edges are pulling things out of voids.

5:41 The emptier a void is, the harder gravity is pulling on what remains.

5:46 It's really like a tug of war where one side isn’t even trying.

5:50 Over time voids are really only getting even emptier

5:53 and the walls and knots around them denser and brighter.

5:58 Would it be hard to fly into a cosmic void with a spaceship?

6:02 Well not technically,

6:02 the hardest part is escaping the gravity of your home galaxy.

6:07 It also doesn’t make much sense because… what

6:10 exactly do you want to visit inside a void?

6:12 It makes sense to fly into a void if you want to hide.

6:16 Like really, really hide.

6:18 But what cosmic horror would be scary enough

6:21 for a civilization to try to escape into a cosmic void?

6:25 Galaxies in the crowded cluster regions like our milky way are very active,

6:30 since its neighbours’ gravity tugs and pulls at it, they collide and merge.

6:35 Void galaxies are so isolated that they are aging in slow motion.

6:39 They tend to be smaller, bluer and full of gas,

6:44 birthing new stars slower and calmer.

6:46 So void galaxies could be the last places

6:49 that will stay habitable in our dying universe.

6:52 The last star in the universe will likely be born here.

6:56 So maybe in a 100 trillion years or so a desperate alien race will embark

7:01 on an impossible journey to stretch their existence

7:04 just a bit longer inside a void galaxy.

7:08 There is one more thing that makes voids unique places: Dark Energy.

7:12 The mysterious force that most scientists think is accelerating

7:16 the expansion of the universe and will ultimately cause its demise.

7:21 We can’t see dark energy do anything inside

7:23 our galaxy or inside clusters because there is

7:26 too much stuff pulling things together via gravity–

7:29 but we can see its effects inside voids.

7:32 Here dark energy blows up the bubbles of nothing.

7:36 This is where the acceleration of cosmic expansion becomes visible.

7:42 As voids are getting larger and larger,

7:44 they are breaking the structure of the universe,

7:47 the beautiful galaxy filaments are slowly being ripped apart.

7:52 As the emptiness encroaches,

7:53 walls of thousands of galaxies are thinned out and pulled

7:57 towards the edges– attracted by much denser regions at the margins,

8:01 giving space to the emptiness of two void bubbles becoming one.

8:07 In the far, far future supervoids will take over the observable universe.

8:12 Crushing clusters, and expanding further and further,

8:16 until the entire observable universe is nothing

8:19 more than a gigantic void of nothingness.

8:23 The loneliest place in existence.

8:28 Let’s head back to Earth.

8:29 When we land, please exit through the gift shop and pick up a few souvenirs.

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