May 23, 2011 08:48 GMT  ·  By

In a new study, a team of astronomers proposes that a so-called Universe-in-mas black hole is responsible for the development of an incredibly-large void in the constellation Eridanus.

The feature, a billion-light-years-wide bubble of nothing, was until now explained using dark energy and its influences. However, the new paper seems to indicate that this is not the case, and that the elusive substance has little to do with the development of the void.

The most interesting conclusion of the new proposal is that, at the end of the known Universe, a more-than-supermassive black hole is consuming stars and planetary systems. The massive hole in the Cosmos where this is believed to take place was found four years ago.

University of Minnesota astronomers found the structure in August 2007, and calculated it to be 1 billion light-years across. For comparison, the Milky Way is just 100,000 light-years in diameter.

Interestingly, the void was found to contain no dark energy whatsoever. No stars, galaxies, planets, black holes were found within either. In addition, not even cosmic dust and hydrogen gas could be detected there. This led experts to propose that a black hole exists there.

Voids are not at all uncommon around the Universe, given baryonic matter's tendency to clump together in galaxies, clusters and superclusters. But this discovery puzzled everyone.

“Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size,” says UM investigator Lawrence Rudnick, who was a member of the team that discovered the massive void.

Researchers used the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope to conduct this investigation. The team found that the feature is not a part of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation.

The existence of such a Universe-in-mass black hole could provide an elegant explanation for the ever-accelerating expansion of the Cosmos, which sees clusters moving away from each other at speeds that increases constantly.

While proponents of dark matter and dark energy seek to explain this by figuring out the effects of the Big Bang, the new propositions searches for the cause of this acceleration outside the boundaries of the Hubble Universe, Daily Galaxy reports.

It could even be that the “Eridanus black hole” was able to swallow parts of the CMB. This would account for why the background radiations appear to be a little colder in the void than anywhere else.

In recent times, massive-scale surveys of the skies have revealed the existence of large numbers of giant voids between galaxies. One of them – the largest found to date – is 3.5 billion light-years across.