Like a bright city in the middle of a barren desert, our galactic neighborhood is enveloped by a cosmic void — an enormous, almost unfathomably empty pocket of space. Recently, sky surveys have spotted thousands more of these vacant bubbles. Now, researchers have found a way to pull information out of these cosmic voids: By counting how many of them exist in a volume of space, scientists have devised a new way to explore two of the thorniest questions in cosmology.
“It’s the very first time that we have used void numbers to extract cosmological information,” said Alice Pisani, a cosmologist at Princeton University and the Flatiron Institute and an author of a new preprint describing the work. “If we want to push the boundaries of science, we need to go beyond what has already been done.”
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