Surveying the redshifts of bright galaxies out to 800 megaparsecs, a group of astronomers has found preliminary evidence for the existence of a gigantic void—a million‐cubic‐megaparsec volume devoid of bright galaxies—in the northern sky. In a recent Astrophysical Journal Letter, Robert Kirshner (University of Michigan), Augustus Oemler (Yale), Paul Schechter (Harvard–Smithsonian and Kitt Peak) and Stephen Shectman (Mount Wilson and Las Campanas Observatories) report that their deep redshift surveys of three small angular regions in the constellation Boötes show identical 6000‐km/second gaps in the velocity distribution of galaxies down to 16th magnitude. The three sampled regions, each 1.4° square, form a roughly equilateral triangle on the celestial sphere, about 35° on a side. Assuming that the entire triangular region will ultimately prove to be “empty” in this same 6000‐km/second velocity interval, centered at 15 000 km/second, one would deduce the existence of a void more than 100 megaparsecs across, about 300 Mpc ( light years) distant from us.
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
January 1982
January 01 1982
Deep redshift survey of galaxies suggests million‐ void
Physics Today 35 (1), 17–19 (1982);
Citation
Bertram M. Schwarzschild; Deep redshift survey of galaxies suggests million‐ void. Physics Today 1 January 1982; 35 (1): 17–19. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2889995
Download citation file:
PERSONAL SUBSCRIPTION
Purchase an annual subscription for $25. A subscription grants you access to all of Physics Today's current and backfile content.
Sign In
You could not be signed in. Please check your credentials and make sure you have an active account and try again.
9
Views
Citing articles via
The lessons learned from ephemeral nuclei
Witold Nazarewicz; Lee G. Sobotka
FYI science policy briefs
Lindsay McKenzie; Jacob Taylor