Oleg Zabluda's blog
Sunday, July 08, 2012
 
The Boötes void is a largest known and approximately spherically shaped region of almost empty space (250 Mly in...
The Boötes void is a largest known and approximately spherically shaped region of almost empty space (250 Mly in diameter and  236,000 Mpc^3 in volume), located in Boötes (Волопас), with center 700 Mly away. As viewed from Milky Way, it's 20 degrees across. Robert Kirshner et al. discovered it in 1981. By 1997, the Boötes void was known to contain only 60 galaxies (10,000 expected based on averages).

According to astronomer Greg Aldering, the scale of the void is such that "If the Milky Way had been in the center of the Boötes void, we wouldn't have known there were other galaxies until the 1960s.

For comparison, from Milky Way, several galaxies are visible with a naked eye
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_galaxies#List_of_naked-eye_galaxies
and many more with small binoculars or a telescope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_galaxies.

It can be used as follows:

- Racing, like Bonneville Salt Flats Speedway. A relativistic starship has a huge problem of deflecting/shielding incoming particles (even blue-shifted CMB photons), nothing to say about intergalactic dust. Accelerating/turning starships also radiate gravity waves (from which there is no shielding), stretching and squeezing people in nearby galaxies, who get all pissed and stuff.

- Testing cosmological weapons of mass destruction (Higgs bomb, etc). In fact, maybe that's how it was created in the first place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%C3%B6tes_void
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%C3%B6tes_void

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