These aren’t the voids you’re looking for

Australian astronomers have shown galaxies in the vast empty regions of the Universe are actually aligned into delicate strings in research published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

A team of astronomers based at The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) has found short strings of faint galaxies in what were previously thought to be extremely empty parts of space.

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> “This means that voids might be much smaller than we previously thought, and that galaxies that were previously thought to be in a void might just be part of a tendril”

That matches up with what i’d expect from a fluid mechanics point of view.

By the way, the geometry of these voids and strings of galaxies has now been used in medicine. Analogies exist between the distribution of galaxies in the early universe and strengthening filaments within bone cavities. The mathematical description of the former has now been applied to the latter, to get a better understanding of how filament arrangements relate to bone strength.