By now, you’ve probably heard about the gaping hole in the middle of everything, as covered by Scientific American (from Reuters):
The team at the University of Minnesota said the void is nearly a billion light-years across and they have no idea why it is there.
“Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size,” said astronomy professor Lawrence Rudnick.
But you might have missed the most interesting thing – that some astrophysicists predicted the hole would be there because, they say, the universe is really one big fractal. In other words, it’s a pattern that has the same shape on the cosmic scale (spiral clusters of galaxies, which are spiral clusters of stars, which look something like spiraling solar systems & Oort clouds) as on the little bit we can see with our own eyes (the spiral of a hurricane, spawning spiraling tornadoes, sucking up tiny, spiral rotifers from the spiral whorls of lakes and streams).
Keep zooming out and you see that the galaxy is part of a cluster of galaxies and the cluster of galaxies is part of a supercluster of galaxies and and the supercluster of galaxies is … This is where the debate begins.
According to the standard model, there’s nothing bigger than a supercluster. When I interviewed mainstream physicists David Hogg and Daniel Eisenstein for my article, they were claiming that the pattern should start to smooth out at about 200 million light years. According to the fractal guys, it just keeps getting bigger.
In other words, there’s a hole in the middle of the universe because there’s a hole in us. It’s built into the design.