science

There’s growing speculation that 13.767 billions years may be the earliest that the universe can support life, due to events like this. The universe had to expand, a lot, to get to a place where life had a chance to evolve, and not get obliterated by these types of events.

Plus our galaxy may be in a void. A really big one at that:

In 2013 Barger and two colleagues, Ryan Keenan (then at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Taiwan) and Lennox Cowie (University of Hawai‘i) counted some 35,000 galaxies from multiple surveys. What they found is that the Milky Way appears to live in a relatively empty area. Per unit volume, there’s half again as much light reaching us from galaxies 1.5 billion light-years away as there is from galaxies right around us.

It’s as if we’re living in the suburbs, and the skyglow we see in our backyard comes more from distant cities than from our neighbors.

If this sparse region that we live in is a true cosmic void, then at 1.5 billion light-years in radius, it’s well above average in size, says Hoscheit. Typical voids have radii between 90 million light-years and 450 million light-years, he says. But this void would be so big, it would encompass the Laniakea Supercluster, which the Milky Way and its Local Group of galaxies call home, as well as the Tully Local Void, which Laniakea borders. “It would be the largest void known to science,” he says.

From: https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/does-milky-way-live-cosmic-void/

So the fact that our black hole (Sagittarius A*) hasn’t done this, and that we’re far away from other black holes that have done this, just might be why you’re reading this reply.

Let’s toast to our existence in the backwaters of our galaxy and the KBC void! 🥂