Although Italian by birth, maritime explorer Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and discovered the Americas under the Spanish emperorâs name. During his first voyage, he led three Spanish galleons, the NiÃ±a, Pinta, and the Santa Maria.
Instead of the general notion that a void is a region of space with a low cosmic mean density; a hole in the distribution of galaxies, it defines voids to be regions in which matter is escaping; which corresponds to the Dark Energy equation of state, w.
And the void is huge. It's 220 megaparsecs in radius, more than 700 million light years, which makes it one of the biggest - if not the biggest - physical structures in the universe. Such a large void is uncommon, with maybe only a handful in existence, Szapudi says.