Scientists Think Earth Might Be Stuck in a Giant Cosmic Void

Researchers from the University of Portsmouth, led by Indranil Banik, propose that the Milky Way sits near the center of a huge underdense region, or void, more than 2 billion light-years wide, and that this could explain the faster-than-expected local expansion of the universe known as the Hubble tension. The team, presenting at this year's Royal Astronomical Society meeting in Durham, analyzed two decades of Big Bang echo data, including baryon acoustic oscillations, which the article describes as pressure waves from the early universe that act like a cosmic ruler. Based on those measurements, the team argues it is about 100 times more likely that we live inside a void than in a region of average density.