Although Italian by birth, maritime explorer Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and discovered the Americas under the Spanish emperorâs name. During his first voyage, he led three Spanish galleons, the NiÃ±a, Pinta, and the Santa Maria.
Instead of the general notion that a void is a region of space with a low cosmic mean density; a hole in the distribution of galaxies, it defines voids to be regions in which matter is escaping; which corresponds to the Dark Energy equation of state, w.
Not a black hole, for a change, but a vaster expanse of darkness. On the largest scales explored, galaxies are arranged into great walls and knots as much as a few hundred million light years across, with voids in between. The biggest known void â freakishly large at around a billion light years â was found in 2007.