Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: Welcome back everyone. Today, we're diving into something truly immense,
Speaker 2: maybe the biggest emptiest structures we know of the cosmic voids.
Speaker 2: These are just these enormous gaps you see in the
Speaker 2: large scale structure of the universe, the places where gravity
Speaker 2: seems weakest and almost everything seems to have well cleared out.
Speaker 2: For a long time, people pretty much assumed they were
Speaker 2: just completely empty, you know, huge black nothings like holes
Speaker 2: punched in space. But now we actually have the tools
Speaker 2: the technology to map these things out see how they evolve.
Speaker 2: So our goal today to really dig into the latest
Speaker 2: findings and figure out what's actually in there. If anything,
Speaker 2: We've pulled together the research to give you the clearest
Speaker 2: possible picture of what these unbelievably vast spaces contain. Because
Speaker 2: the answer isn't just nothing. It's more interesting than that.
Speaker 2: The scale, though it's almost impossible to really get your
Speaker 2: head around. We'll try.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that nothing at all idea is the starting point, absolutely,
Speaker 3: and it's true. They are mostly defined by well by
Speaker 3: what's not there, a profound lack of matter. But the
Speaker 3: key thing, the really crucial insight from the material we
Speaker 3: looked at, is that they aren't, you know, totally one
Speaker 3: hundred percent empty, not across their entire colossal volume. Anyway,
Speaker 3: They're definitely the closest thing to a vacuum we have, sure,
Speaker 3: but there's still structure. There's a great analogy that helps.
Speaker 3: I think I mentioned deserts on Earth. Okay, like say
Speaker 3: the empty Quarter in Arabia. It's defined by a lack
Speaker 3: of water, a lack of big life forms. You wouldn't
Speaker 3: call it teeming, right, definitely not, but it's not lifeless.
Speaker 3: There's still stuff there, maybe some deeprooted plants, insects, maybe
Speaker 3: a tiny mammal hanging on. It's incredibly sparse.
Speaker 2: Right, There is life, just very little.
Speaker 3: Of it exactly. The cosmic voids are basically the Universe's
Speaker 3: version of that, the ultimate sparse environment.
Speaker 2: Okay, so let's really get into that sparseness, that scale,
Speaker 2: because I think you're right. You can't grasp how empty
Speaker 2: a void is until you understand how empty the average
Speaker 2: universe is already, which is pretty staggering in itself. We
Speaker 2: need that baseline. So the observable universe, right, this immense
Speaker 2: volume ninety something billion light years across the material we
Speaker 2: have lays out this fantastic thought experiment. Imagine you could
Speaker 2: take absolutely everything in that whole volume, every planet, star, galaxy,
Speaker 2: gas cloud, and crucially all the dark matter, dark energy too,
Speaker 2: all the stuff, all the stuff, and just spread it
Speaker 2: out perfectly, even like cosmic butter, across the.
Speaker 3: Entire universe, right, a uniform smear.
Speaker 2: What density do you end up with?
Speaker 3: And the result is, well, it's mind boggling, really defines
Speaker 3: the emptiness for city. And you end up with an
Speaker 3: average density of roughly get this, Yeah, one single hydrogen
Speaker 3: atom per cubica.
Speaker 2: The one atom in a cubic meter. Just try to
Speaker 2: picture that a cubic meter. That's a pretty big box, right,
Speaker 2: like arms outstretched, wide, high, deep, and inside that entire volume,
Speaker 2: just one solitary, lonely hydrogen atom floating around. That's the
Speaker 2: average density of everything.
Speaker 3: It's almost nothing.
Speaker 2: It's practically nothing. We only think the universe is dense
Speaker 2: because while most of that matter is crammed into tiny
Speaker 2: spots like Earth or the Sun or our galaxy.
Speaker 3: Exactly, gravity pulls it together.
Speaker 2: The air you're breathing right now, the chair you're sitting on,
Speaker 2: that's trillions upon trillions of times denser than that cosmic average.
Speaker 3: It's wild, it is wild. Ye, it's almost impossible to
Speaker 3: visualize that kind of vacuum. I mean, even if you
Speaker 3: took that cubic meter box and sucked all the air out,
Speaker 3: cooled it to absolute zero, it would still be way
Speaker 3: denser than the universe's average. The vastness is just ugh.
Speaker 2: Okay, so that's our baseline, one atom cubic meter on average.
Speaker 2: Now here's where the voids come in and just blow
Speaker 2: that away, because they are way emptier than that already
Speaker 2: incredibly sparse average.
Speaker 3: Right, This is where it gets really interesting. They are
Speaker 3: the emptiest of the empty.
Speaker 2: So how much emptier?
Speaker 3: Well, when scientists model these structures, a typical void, averaging
Speaker 3: its density across its whole span edge to edge, comes
Speaker 3: out at only about one fifth, So twenty percent of
Speaker 3: that average universal density twenty percent.
Speaker 2: Okay, at first that sounds maybe not that much nuss,
Speaker 2: but wait.
Speaker 3: Exactly, but remember what the average was. It was already
Speaker 3: basically zero one atom per cubic meter.
Speaker 2: So twenty percent of almost nothing is even closer to nothing.
Speaker 3: Precisely, if the average universe is one hydrogen atom per
Speaker 3: cubic meter, avoid averages out to only point two hydrogen atoms.
Speaker 2: Per cubic meter zero point two, so less than one
Speaker 2: atom per cubic meter on average inside Avoid.
Speaker 3: Yeah. To put in another way, think about that box again.
Speaker 3: Instead of needing one cubic meter to find on average,
Speaker 3: one atom inside a void, you'd need a volume five
Speaker 3: times bigger five cubic meters, a huge space just to
Speaker 3: find that single, lonely hydrogen atom on average.
Speaker 2: Wow. Okay, that really drives home the scale of the desolation.
Speaker 3: I guess it really does. It fundamentally changes how you
Speaker 3: think about emptiness. And importantly, that twenty percent figure, that's
Speaker 3: itself a bit misleading because it's an average density for
Speaker 3: the entire void, including its edges, its boundaries.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, and the edges are presumably where they bump
Speaker 2: up against the denser parts of the universe exactly.
Speaker 3: They border the filaments and walls of the cosmic web,
Speaker 3: where there's more matter, So those boundary regions are naturally
Speaker 3: a bit denser relatively speaking, they pull the average up.
Speaker 2: So if you could somehow just measure the very center
Speaker 2: the deep interior, it would.
Speaker 3: Be much much lower than twenty percent of the average density,
Speaker 3: way sparser. The vast majority of a void's volume is
Speaker 3: far emptier than even that zero point two atoms per
Speaker 3: cubic meter suggests.
Speaker 2: Okay, so they're these super vacuums basically, but like you said,
Speaker 2: not totally easier. So what is that remaining trace amount
Speaker 2: of stuff? What contributes to that tiny bit of density.
Speaker 2: Let's move beyond just the numbers. What can we actually
Speaker 2: see or detect in there?
Speaker 3: Right? What are the contents?
Speaker 2: Yeah, our deep galaxy surveys, the ones looking for the
Speaker 2: faintest light over huge distances. They do find things. It's sparse,
Speaker 2: very sparse, but it's specific stuff. We see things like
Speaker 2: dim dwarf galaxies, these little, often kind of raggedy looking
Speaker 2: clumps of stars, galaxies that just didn't have enough material
Speaker 2: nearby to grow big and grand. Like the Milky Way.
Speaker 3: The runs of the galactic litter, basically pretty much.
Speaker 2: And we also detect these incredibly thin, tenuous threads of gas,
Speaker 2: mostly hydrogen, sometimes linking these dwarf galaxies.
Speaker 3: Whispers of matter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. These are structures that are unbelievably hard to spot.
Speaker 2: They're so dim they push our telescopes right to the limit,
Speaker 2: but they are there. It confirms the voids aren't perfect holes.
Speaker 2: They have some some sparse furniture, maybe mostly near the edges.
Speaker 3: That's the stuff. Yeah, the baryonic matter, as we call it,
Speaker 3: the normal matter, like the dust motes you might see
Speaker 3: floating in a sunbeam in an otherwise empty room. Okay,
Speaker 3: but the picture gets way more complex and honestly more
Speaker 3: fascinating when we factor in the invisible stuff dark matter.
Speaker 2: Ah right, the mysterious scaffolding of the universe. We can't
Speaker 2: see it, but it's what like eighty five percent of
Speaker 2: the matter out there.
Speaker 3: Something like that. Yeah. It's gravity dictates where everything else goes,
Speaker 3: and even though we can't observe it directly, we can
Speaker 3: model its behavior with incredible precision using supercomputers.
Speaker 2: Okay, so what do those simulations show happening inside the voids?
Speaker 2: Is the dark matter just not there, not at all.
Speaker 3: This is what's so cool. The simulations show that the
Speaker 3: voids aren't just smooth, empty holes in the dark matter
Speaker 3: distribution either. They actually contain entire mini cosmic webs made
Speaker 3: of dark matter.
Speaker 2: Mini webs inside the voids, like a ghost structure within
Speaker 2: the emptiness.
Speaker 3: Exactly a ghostly hidden scaffolding. Think of the main cosmic web,
Speaker 3: the big one, like this massive three D spot structure,
Speaker 3: or a network of connected filaments and walls. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 3: the voids are the huge holes in that sponge. But
Speaker 3: the simulations show that even within those giant holes, dark
Speaker 3: matter is still there, just at incredibly low densities, and
Speaker 3: its gravity, even though it's super wank, is still enough
Speaker 3: to pull it into finer, sparser structures.
Speaker 2: So it's like webs within webs.
Speaker 3: Pretty much. The source material we reviewed actually knows this complexity.
Speaker 3: It describes how voids seem to be divided into smaller subvoids,
Speaker 3: and those subvoids might be further divided into sub subvoids,
Speaker 3: all defined by these incredibly faint filments of dark matter. Wow,
Speaker 3: and this structure, this pattern repeating at smaller scales, even
Speaker 3: in the emptiest regions gives it what the researchers call
Speaker 3: a slight fractal character.
Speaker 2: Fractal like those repeating patterns in mathematics.
Speaker 3: Sort of yeah. It means the basic pattern of the
Speaker 3: cosmic web, filaments connecting denser nodes surrounding emptier regions, seems
Speaker 3: to repeat itself even down here at these incredibly low
Speaker 3: densities within the voids themselves. It's a remarkable hint about
Speaker 3: how fundamental that web structure is to the universe's architecture.
Speaker 2: Why is that significant, though? Does it tell something important
Speaker 2: that there's this faint, fractal structure even in the voids.
Speaker 3: I think it does. It shows that gravity dominated by
Speaker 3: dark matter, is always at work shaping things, even where
Speaker 3: there's almost nothing to shape.
Speaker 2: Right, It's not just chaos in there.
Speaker 3: No, That fractal character suggests that even the weakest gravitational
Speaker 3: fields operating over cosmic time still impose order and structure.
Speaker 3: It prevents even the voids from becoming perfectly uniform. It
Speaker 3: shows structure formation is still happening, just incredibly slowly and
Speaker 3: on a tiny scale compared to the main web. It
Speaker 3: tells us the void isn't just a hole. It's an
Speaker 3: integral structured part of the cosmic landscape.
Speaker 2: So the big cosmic web has these holes the voids,
Speaker 2: but the holes themselves have this faint ghost scaffolding inside,
Speaker 2: making even smaller holes within them.
Speaker 3: It's a good way to picture it, and we have
Speaker 3: to keep coming back to those boundaries, those edges we
Speaker 3: talked about, right.
Speaker 2: The reason the average density isn't even.
Speaker 3: Lower exactly that twenty percent average figure relies heavily on
Speaker 3: the material clinging near the void's perimeter. The voids don't
Speaker 3: just stop, they as the source puts it butt up
Speaker 3: against walls and clusters and filaments of the main, denser
Speaker 3: cosmic web.
Speaker 2: It's like the shallow edge of a deep lake. Right.
Speaker 2: The edges make the average depth seem less than it
Speaker 2: is in the middle.
Speaker 3: Perfect analogy. Those boundary regions are by definition less void like.
Speaker 3: They have more dwarf galaxies, more gas, more dark matter
Speaker 3: influence from the nearby structures, so.
Speaker 2: They disproportionately bump up that overall average density figure, masking
Speaker 2: just how profoundly empty the real core of the void is, which.
Speaker 3: Brings us to the next step. Yeah, if we really
Speaker 3: want to talk about true, unadulterated emptiness, cosmic scale loneliness.
Speaker 3: We have to mentally zoom past those edges, past the
Speaker 3: dim little galaxies, past those faint gas thres We need
Speaker 3: to go deep into the interior. Okay, we need to
Speaker 3: focus on the deepest, most isolated regions of the void's heartland.
Speaker 2: This is where it gets really extreme, isn't it.
Speaker 3: This is it. These areas millions of light years away
Speaker 3: from any significant structure, any major gravitational pull. This is
Speaker 3: where the sources talk about the truly lifeless portions.
Speaker 2: Existing lifeless in terms of lacking structure, lacking anything pretty much.
Speaker 3: The information uses some really evocative comparisons to places on Earth,
Speaker 3: trying to give us a sense of the desolation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I saw those places like the Katara Depression and
Speaker 2: the Sahara or the empty Quartered desert or bad Water
Speaker 2: Basin in Death Valley, places known for being about as
Speaker 2: barren and dry as Earth gets.
Speaker 3: Right, trying to anchor this cosmic emptiness to something terrestrial.
Speaker 2: But honestly, even those analogies feel like they fall short,
Speaker 2: massively short.
Speaker 3: Oh, they absolutely do, because when we talk about these
Speaker 3: core void regions, we're not talking about a few hundred
Speaker 3: kilometers of desert. We're talking about volumes of space where
Speaker 3: there's essentially nothing for distances up to millions of light years, millions.
Speaker 2: Of light years, not meters, not kilometers light years, an
Speaker 2: almost unbroken vacuum stretching further than many galaxies are wide.
Speaker 3: It just resets your whole perspective on empty Traveling from
Speaker 3: one random particle, maybe a stray hydgen atam, maybe a
Speaker 3: dark matter particle that happens to be zipping through to
Speaker 3: the next particle, that journey could take longer than it
Speaker 3: takes light to cross entire galaxy clusters.
Speaker 2: Millions of years for light to cross the gap between stray.
Speaker 3: Particles potentially yeah, in those deepest cores.
Speaker 2: So if the density is effectively zero over such huge scales,
Speaker 2: why even call it a void with structure? Why isn't
Speaker 2: it just incredibly empty space? Is there anything physically stopping
Speaker 2: it from being a perfect absolute vacuum.
Speaker 3: That's a really good question. Why isn't it just nothing?
Speaker 3: The reason it's classified as avoid is structural, right, It's
Speaker 3: defined by its location between the denser filaments of the
Speaker 3: cosmic web. It's the space carved out by gravity pulling
Speaker 3: matter away from it.
Speaker 2: Okay, so its existence is defined by what's around.
Speaker 3: It largely yes, and physically, is it a perfect vacuum, No,
Speaker 3: because quantum fluctuations can still in principle create particle antiparticle pairs,
Speaker 3: though they annihilate quickly, and just random chance dictates that
Speaker 3: some particles will eventually pass through any given volume, even
Speaker 3: if incredibly and frequently.
Speaker 2: So not technically one hundred point zero zero percent empty,
Speaker 2: but practically practically.
Speaker 3: It's the closest thing imaginable. And crucially, the dark matter
Speaker 3: simulations back this up. They show this profound level of
Speaker 3: emptiness right in the cores of the voids. The random
Speaker 3: particle presence is so incredibly low. The source material really
Speaker 3: emphasizes this that if you were sitting in one spot
Speaker 3: waiting for say a hydrogen atom or a dark matter
Speaker 3: particle to pass by, you'd have to wait a really
Speaker 3: really long time before the next.
Speaker 2: One really really long time measured in cosmic time scales.
Speaker 3: Problem well, easily, it's a vacuum so profound that meaningful
Speaker 3: particle interactions or collisions just don't happen. It's stillness on
Speaker 3: an unimaginable scale.
Speaker 2: Okay, the sheer depth of emptiness, this near total vacuum
Speaker 2: in the void core. It sets up this incredible thought experiment,
Speaker 2: one that really stood out in the research we looked at.
Speaker 2: It almost bridges physics and well philosophy.
Speaker 3: It really does. It forces you to think about the
Speaker 3: link between the physical structure of the universe, where we
Speaker 3: happen to be located, and what that means for life,
Speaker 3: for knowledge, for civilization itself.
Speaker 2: Right, So let's unpack it. The scenario post is, what
Speaker 2: if what if our solar system, the Sun, Earth, all
Speaker 2: the planets, wasn't where it is now, inside a galaxy,
Speaker 2: inside a filament of the cosmic web. What if somehow
Speaker 2: it was transported deep into the core of one of
Speaker 2: these massive voids, millions of light years from.
Speaker 3: Anything, right plunk down in the middle of that profound emptiness.
Speaker 2: What would that even look like? What would the consequences be?
Speaker 3: Well, the immediate visual impact, according the analysis is just chilling,
Speaker 3: and it dictates everything else. From Earth looking up at
Speaker 3: the night sky, there would be no stars, no stars
Speaker 3: at all, none, absolutely zero. The only things you'd see
Speaker 3: in the sky would be the Sunday obviously, our Moon,
Speaker 3: and the other planets in our own solar system.
Speaker 2: That's it.
Speaker 3: Everything else will be projected against a backdrop of perfect, unending,
Speaker 3: unbroken blackness.
Speaker 2: Wow. Just imagine that, looking up at night and seeing
Speaker 2: nothing but pitch black. Maybe Mars or Jupiter is a
Speaker 2: point of light, but absolutely nothing else forever.
Speaker 3: We totally take the story night sky for granted, don't we.
Speaker 3: It's the constant wallpaper of our existence completely.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but we only see those stars. We only know
Speaker 2: we're in a galaxy because we happen to live in
Speaker 2: a relatively dense neighborhood, a brightly lit street.
Speaker 3: Cosmically speaking, exactly, being in a void changes everything for discovery.
Speaker 3: If you're that civilization on void Earth, the nearest external
Speaker 3: galaxy isn't just far away, it's millions of light years.
Speaker 2: Away, and without any nearby stars galaxies, how would you
Speaker 2: even know it was out there? How would you even
Speaker 2: begin to look?
Speaker 3: That's the challenge. Even if this hypothetical avoid civilization developed
Speaker 3: telescopes just as powerful as ours today. Say they built
Speaker 3: their own version of the James webspased telescope. Okay, that
Speaker 3: nearest galaxy, millions of light years distant, would appear as
Speaker 3: just the source describes it as a faint, dim smudge
Speaker 3: in the extreme distance.
Speaker 2: A smudge, not even a point of light, just a
Speaker 2: barely detectable, fuzzy patch.
Speaker 3: Barely detectable, fainter than the faintest star we could see
Speaker 3: with the naked eye. It would require immense effort, long exposures,
Speaker 3: complex filtering just to confirm it's even there.
Speaker 2: So this leads to a really profound, almost unsettling question,
Speaker 2: doesn't it. If you're that civilization, you look up, you
Speaker 2: see blackness in your local planets, would you ever even
Speaker 2: develop astronomy beyond just mapping your own solar system?
Speaker 3: Would the motivation be there?
Speaker 2: Right? Would you pour resources into building incredibly advanced telescopes
Speaker 2: just to hunt for a single, incredibly faint smudge millions
Speaker 2: of light years away, especially when there's no guarantee you'll
Speaker 2: find anything at all.
Speaker 3: Think about the development of astronomy here on Earth. It
Speaker 3: was driven by observing the patterns of nearby bright objects, stars, planets,
Speaker 3: the Milky Way arching across the sky, that gave us
Speaker 3: data questions, the drive to build better instruments. But in
Speaker 3: the void, in the void, astronomical observation beyond your own
Speaker 3: system would be incredibly tedious, expensive, and give almost no
Speaker 3: immediate payoff the incenting to become cosmologists to study the
Speaker 3: universe beyond your own backyard, it would be incredibly low.
Speaker 2: The implications are just huge. If you don't see other
Speaker 2: galaxies easily, you have.
Speaker 3: No visible evidence for them.
Speaker 2: You wouldn't see the large scale structure the cosmic web
Speaker 2: because the walls are too far away. You wouldn't have
Speaker 2: easily measurable markers for things like red shift, which is
Speaker 2: how we figured out distances and the expansion of the universe.
Speaker 3: Exactly measuring red shift relies on having lots of galaxies
Speaker 3: at different distances to compare if your nearest neighbor is
Speaker 3: millions of light years off and looks like a smudge,
Speaker 3: good Lucke building a Hubble diagram.
Speaker 2: So they might never discover the expanding universe very likely not.
Speaker 2: They might never conceive of the Big Bang.
Speaker 3: How could they? The evidence would be almost completely hidden
Speaker 3: from them.
Speaker 2: Their entire understanding of physics of reality might be limited
Speaker 2: to just their own star system floating alone in an eternal,
Speaker 2: unchanging darkness.
Speaker 3: Which leads to that ultimate chilling question the source material poses.
Speaker 3: Would they even know that the rest of the universe
Speaker 3: is out there?
Speaker 2: Would they even suspect it, or would they conclude that
Speaker 2: their solar system is the entire universe.
Speaker 3: It's a profound thought. It really makes you realize how
Speaker 3: much of our own scientific understanding are Cosmology. Our physics
Speaker 3: isn't just a result of human ingenuity. It's also heavily
Speaker 3: dependent on our location, our lucky vantage point.
Speaker 2: We're lucky to live in a busy neighborhood.
Speaker 3: We really are. We're lucky to be bathed in the
Speaker 3: light from nearby stars and galaxies, lucky to be close
Speaker 3: enough to the large scale structure that we can actually
Speaker 3: map it out. Our ability to measure things like red
Speaker 3: shift and the Hubble flow is only easy because we
Speaker 3: have thousands millions of galaxies relatively close by to study.
Speaker 2: If those data points were all millions of light years away.
Speaker 3: The task of discovering cosmology would be almost insurmountably difficult,
Speaker 3: maybe impossible.
Speaker 2: It really puts things in perspective. So let's just quickly
Speaker 2: recap the journey we took today. We started by trying
Speaker 2: to grasp the average emptiness of the universe.
Speaker 3: Which is already stunningly empty, about one hydrogen atom per
Speaker 3: cubic meter on average.
Speaker 2: Then we plunged into the voids, finding their average density
Speaker 2: is even lower, around twenty percent of that maybe point
Speaker 2: two hydrogen atoms per cubic meter.
Speaker 3: But realizing that number is skewed high by the denser
Speaker 3: edges of the voids.
Speaker 2: Right and from there we went into the true deep core,
Speaker 2: the heart of the void.
Speaker 3: Where the emptiness becomes almost absolute, essentially zero density for
Speaker 3: millions of light years at a stretch broken only by
Speaker 3: the rarest stray particle or the ghost structure of dark matter.
Speaker 2: The main takeaway then, is that voids aren't just holes.
Speaker 2: They're fundamental components of the universe's structure. They define the
Speaker 2: walls and filaments by their very.
Speaker 3: Absence exactly, and while they aren't technically perfectly empty, they
Speaker 3: have those dwarf galaxies, the gas threads, the dark matter
Speaker 3: mini webs. The level of sheer desolation in their cores
Speaker 3: is a type of vacuum that's genuinely hard for us
Speaker 3: living here in our dense galaxy to truly wrap our minds.
Speaker 2: Around, which loops us right back to that void civilization
Speaker 2: thought experiment. Because of the sources we looked at, and
Speaker 2: with a really provocative twist on that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, turning the question back on ourselves.
Speaker 2: If a civilization and avoid might never know the rest
Speaker 2: of the universe exists because the evidence is too faint,
Speaker 2: too far, well, what might we be missing?
Speaker 3: What crucial aspects of reality, What fundamental structures or forces
Speaker 3: might be hidden from us simply because of our particular location.
Speaker 2: How much of what we think we know about the
Speaker 2: cosmos is just down to the good fortune of living
Speaker 2: inside a bright, busy galactic filament where certain things are
Speaker 2: easy to see.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a humbling thought, isn't it. Are there other
Speaker 3: cosmic structures, maybe operating on even larger scales or involving
Speaker 3: physics we haven't conceived of, that are currently invisible to
Speaker 3: us because we don't have the right perspective or the
Speaker 3: signals are too weak from our vantage point?
Speaker 2: What undiscovered cosmic realities are hiding out there simply because
Speaker 2: we're not in the right place or looking in the
Speaker 2: right way to see them? Yet?
Speaker 3: It really underscores why things like large scale simulations are
Speaker 3: so vital. They help us model the parts of the
Speaker 3: universe we can't easily see, like the full extent of
Speaker 3: the dark matter web and the true structure within these voids.
Speaker 2: Because we can only directly observe this relatively small, brightly
Speaker 2: lit fraction of everything from where we sit. The simulations
Speaker 2: help us map the architecture of the whole thing, both
Speaker 2: the crowded places and the vast, profound absences. And understanding
Speaker 2: that absence, the void is just as critical as understanding
Speaker 2: the galaxies themselves. It's all part of the same incredible
Speaker 2: cosmic structure, a structure we're still just beginning to comprehends
Speaker 3: Us