The Unique Dark Sky

I was stunned when I read last week about the huge bubble in the universe that is totally void of any kind of matter. Within a space of 1 billion light-years in diameter there are no galaxies, no stars, even not gas and no trace of the mysterious “dark matter” (I will elaborate later why I don’t believe in dark matter). I thought if we could have a look around from the center of this empty space bubble we would see – nothing. Our eyes would only see deep darkness, no stars, no starry night sky, no light at all. Because the stars are too far away, something like 500 million light-years. From our Earth we can hardly see the milky dash of M31, the Andromeda galaxy, and only because there are 700 or 800 billion stars on one spot in 25 million light-years distance. I always thought that the starlight is filling the whole universe and there is no such place of total darkness. Well, at least this darkness is not “absolute”, because if we were looking around in the center of the dark bubble with the Hubble telescope in hand, than we could indeed detect the faint light of remote galaxies. But for the time being I meditate on this dark, vast and astonishing nothingness.

Pic: Rudnick et al., NRAO / AUI / NSF, NASA