* Astronomy

Stare into the night sky and you can't help being amazed by the sheer scale of the universe. Look for Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. That's 8.6 light years away. Polaris, the North Star, sits 431 light years from us, and the faintly visible Andromeda galaxy lies 2.6 million light years from Earth. These are distances that boggle the mind, yet we're only talking about the scenery in our cosmic backyard.
Is this magnificent view typical, the sort of spectacle you'd see from anywhere in the universe? Not at all. From the middle of the Boötes Void, for instance, the universe appears a very different, and much darker, place.
The Boötes Void is a giant hole in the universe some 350 million light years across, a place where galaxies, for the most part, never formed.

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