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Becky
Heading into the weekend, and into “6 billion trillion miles of emptiness”
by Becky - August 24, 2007 - 7:56 PM

lkjIn case you’re feeling overwhelmed by the unnameable lately, you’re in good company. Scientists just discovered a swath of universe in which there’s really, well, nothing:

The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That’s an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday.

“This is 1,000 times the volume of what we sort of expected to see in terms of a typical void,” said Minnesota astronomy professor Lawrence Rudnick, author of the paper that will be published in Astrophysical Journal. “It’s not clear that we have the right word yet … This is too much of a surprise.”

Hopefully it won’t galvanize…Or else we might need the assistance of Falcor, Bastian, the Childlike Empress, et al.

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Comments (6)

  1. Atreyu! Tell me my name!

    (sorry, I had to do that; moral imperative. Probably a misquote anyhow)

    posted by Jack on 8-24-2007 at 8:29 pm

  2. Yeah, I’m pretty sure Bastian had to call her name.

    posted by Alyssa on 8-24-2007 at 8:44 pm

  3. whoa, the blog i read right before this, on a completely different site and about something completely different (music) referenced the never ending story, too. i guess i never really knew how profound an impact that creepy/awesome movie had (has?).

    posted by katie on 8-25-2007 at 8:11 am

  4. It’s the gooch of the universe.

    posted by redhorse on 8-25-2007 at 12:51 pm

  5. Once again us humans are astounded that theres something we haven’t discovered. I believe theres tons of stuff out there waiting to surprise us, especially in outer space! Imagine,say this space is 1 billion light years away. I something started generating light 999,999,999 yrs ago we still have to wait 1 year to see it. I imagine we are in for many new surprises! Can’t wait till we are able to achieve light speed and then some!

    posted by John Brown on 8-26-2007 at 12:44 pm

  6. I love how, so far, the posts on The Neverending Story outnumber the posts on amazing scientific discoveries by 4:1. Well, make it 5:1 now. My very first thought when I saw this post was, ‘ooh – maybe someone will know what Bastian’s mother’s name was!’ Anyone?

    posted by caitlen315 on 8-27-2007 at 10:53 am

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