The Universe’s Most Terrifying Empty Space

The Boötes Void is a cosmic desert spanning 330 million light-years across. While a region this massive should hold thousands of galaxies, it contains only sixty, making it one of the loneliest places in existence.

Astronomers were shocked to discover this massive bubble because it defies standard theories about how matter should be distributed throughout the universe. If you were placed in the center of this void, you would not have been able to see any galaxies until the twentieth century. The space is so empty that if the Milky Way were located there, we would not have known other galaxies existed until the late 1990s. It remains a profound mystery how such a vast expanse of nothingness formed in the fabric of space.