Are we living in a cosmic “hole”? This new theory is shaking up modern astronomy

New research suggests that our planet may be located within a billion-light-year-wide cosmic void — large enough to fit 20,000 Milky Way galaxies lined up from one end to the other.

This newly identified ‘hole in space,’ known as the KBC Void, may have a density roughly 20% lower than the cosmic average — a figure that lies at the more extreme end of expectations for cosmic voids discovered so far.

Indranil Banik, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Portsmouth, and his team found striking signs of a local void by analysing baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs) — subtle ripples in matter density left behind by pressure waves from the Big Bang that became imprinted in the early Universe.

Cosmic void opens huge questions about Universe

Over billions of years, these oscillations have influenced how galaxies are distributed throughout the cosmos. According to the Cosmological Principle, matter in the Universe should be uniformly distributed on very large scales — but that doesn’t appear to be the case when we analyse our region of space.

By examining two decades’ worth of observational data, the researchers found consistent evidence supporting the idea that we are situated within a vast under-dense region — approximately 20% emptier than the surrounding cosmos.

“By now it’s pretty clear that we are in a significant underdensity,” Banik told Business Insider. “There are still a few people who oppose the idea to a limited extent. For example, some have correctly argued that such a void shouldn’t exist in the standard model — which is true. But unfortunately, that doesn’t prove it’s not there,” he added.“

A potential solution to this inconsistency is that our Galaxy is close to the centre of a large, local void,” Banik continued. “As the void empties out, the velocity of objects moving away from us would be larger than if the void were not there. In other words, it would make the local Universe appear to be expanding faster than it actually is.”

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To expand on that last point: the void’s existence could explain why nearby stars and galaxies appear to be receding from us faster than expected — exceeding the Hubble Constant, which should theoretically be consistent across the Universe. This discrepancy is known as the Hubble Tension, a major puzzle at the forefront of modern cosmology and still under active investigation.

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