There is a patch of the universe so empty it terrifies astronomers, a void roughly 330 million light-years across containing almost nothing at all, so vast and barren that if our galaxy sat in its cen

The universe isn't randomly scattered—it's structured like a cosmic foam, with galaxies clustered along filaments and massive voids in between, one of which is so immense it could have kept us from ever knowing other galaxies existed. The universe, on the whole, is famously enormous. But it’s also, at the level of large-scale structure, considerably less uniform than most popular descriptions of it let on. If you were to take the modern three-dimensional map of galactic positions ... [7592 chars]