The Creature of Boötes Void
A new telescope was built through a collaboration between Cambridge, Caltech, and Princeton. This 800-million-dollar, state-of-the-art device orbits the earth and can be used to generate an image of the furthest reaches of the universe in less than an hour. I signed up to use the machine six months ago and finally was granted 24 hours of access. While the research of many others is to search for new, potentially habitable worlds or discover previously uncharacterized nebulae and stars, I find myself to be more curious with what isn’t there: the numerous massive voids of space between clusters of galaxies. The largest known void in the observable universe is known as Boötes void.
The center of this absence-of-anything is about 700 million light years from earth, meaning it would take 700 million years to reach the void, travelling at the speed of light. Another way of looking at it is that we observe it as it existed 700 million years ago. As soon as the first hour of my new time with the telescope began, I got down to work. First, I sought to make sure I had the void in frame and in focus to make the next 23 hours of my project more fruitful. An hour later, I was giddy with excitement as an image of the void appeared on my screen; but comparing it to my map, I noticed something odd. The Boötes supercluster of galaxies, right on the edge of the observable universe, and on the far side of the void, appeared dark. At first, I assumed the new telescope was out of focus; however, the Corona-Borealis, Ursa Major, and Shapley superclusters that flanked the other sides of the Boötes void did appear to be in focus. “That’s very odd,” I thought to myself. My map of the void had been generated by the Hubble deep field telescope, which takes days of exposure time. “Maybe new technology can’t beat patience?”
I figured I’d try again, this time actively focusing more towards the Boötes superclusters. I couldn’t spend too much time on this, however, as my main objective was to try to discover something within the void itself. As the next hour expired, I poured over the first image. With a project like this, every second of time is precious. The absence of stars in the Boötes supercluster wasn’t the only thing strange when I compared the first image to my map. Some galaxies of the Boötes supercluster were visible - those on the far ends - but they were much closer together than in the Hubble deep field image. It was as though the supercluster was bending, warped, or as though some massive object in the lightless void near to them was pulling them into each other with an enormous gravitational force. That would explain the absence of light from the center of the supercluster. I shuddered as I considered this, both excited and terrified.
The second image came out dark, as well as having nothing else in focus. That image for sure should have shown the superclusters behind the void if nothing were in their way… I adjusted the wavelength of the telescope to look for more infrared light and then focused on the far edge of the void, right next to the Boötes supercluster. This was a wild hypothesis but I couldn’t help myself. What if there really were a massive object so large it could pull galaxies 100 million light years apart in toward each other. An hour passed and my mind was stewing with possibilities. But when the image generated not only did it yield nothing, but the stars and galaxies of the Boötes supercluster that previously had been shielded from view were now visible. Instead, the obstruction appeared over some of the galaxies at the outer edge of the Corona-Borealis supercluster and now galaxies on the edge of the Boötes supercluster seemed to be drawn in towards the Corona-Borealis. “How could this not be a glitch?” I wondered to myself. “If that really is a large object, it’s the fastest moving thing in the universe let alone the largest. It would have to have moved 100 million light years in an hour. That’s not possible. And yet, the evidence is right before my eyes.” I wracked my brain, searching for an alternative explanation as the fourth hour elapsed.
I tried to follow it, assuming it was an object for lack of a better explanation, and sure enough it was now squarely overlapping the Corona-Borealis supercluster. This image was the clearest and most ominous so far. You can’t see an object directly if it isn’t reflecting or emitting light, but similar to electron microscopy, you can make out the shape of an object you can’t see by what can’t pass through it. The darkness carved out of the Corona-Borealis supercluster was the shape of a long, serpent-like fish. That was what I first saw, anyway. Although one image of an object so far away at one angle could still be anything - and yet, there it was again, in the fifth and sixth images pursuing the outskirts of the Corona-Borealis supercluster. There were long, tapestry-like, structureless fins that appeared to sprout and flow from where the fish’s gills would be, if it was in fact a fish.
“I really should stop thinking like this… My colleagues are gonna think I’m nuts. But just for fun, if there really is a fish or some other massive creature, how could it have existed swimming around the largest void in the universe? Perhaps those massive fins absorbed the light of distant stars like large organic solar sails. Maybe it ate scraps of hydrogen littered throughout the void? Maybe there were other things in the void it scavenged and feasted upon.”
I shuddered to imagine a creature so mind-numbingly enormous drifting through this unfathomably vacuous space 700 million years ago. It didn’t move much over the next 16 hours, which, for it, meant that it was travelling at only 500 thousand light years per hour – but in the last 3 hours of my time it increased its pace once again. It made its way into the Shapley supercluster, then into the Centaurus supercluster. It has closed the distance to where we are in the Virgo supercluster - 500 million light years in a few hours.
I wonder if it ever reached us. If it ever came to our solar system when the earth was much younger, hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs even lived. I wonder what it would look like in our night sky. It would probably just swallow the stars.