>>11351367>Pic related: The Canes Venatici Supervoid (a.k.a. the Giant Void) is estimated to be about 1.3 billion light-years in extent, and about 1.5 billion light-years away.Almost twenty years ago, astronomers believe they discovered that the Universe is expanding. Redshift observations of distant galaxies appeared to indicate that the Universe is expanding faster today than it did in the past. Since the data did not fit into models of the Big Bang, the existence of a negative pressure on gravitational fields was proposed. “Negative gravity” was not something they were prepared to defend, so the force was later called, “dark energy” because, like “dark matter” it cannot be detected with any instrument.
Rather than accepting that “anomalies” in their observations exist because the Big Bang theory is faulty, astronomers resort to increasingly arcane ideas involving extra dimensions a lá string theory, or that space is getting bigger.
A previous Picture of the Day commented on the discovery of a “cosmic void” based on the detection of a lower temperature region in space. As the redshift-equals-distance theory indicates, the void extends for more than a billion light-years. It is these “supervoids,” in conjunction with multiple galactic superclusters, that lead astrophysicists to believe they have a confirmation for dark energy.
Regions of greater density in the Universe are said to increase the gravitational energy imparted to microwave emissions from deep space. Conversely, lower density regions (voids) are thought to weaken the signals, because there is reduced mass. Looking at microwave signals from telescopes like the Very Large Array, there appears to be a wide expanse where microwave radiation possesses a larger energy curve than it should exhibit. The problems associated with the Cosmic Microwave Background are not the topic of this paper. Suffice to say, what was thought to be radiation from deep space is really radiation from Earth’s oceans.
