Heading into the weekend, and into "6 billion trillion miles of emptiness"

In 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.