ryan wills; Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images
Ever feel like you are stuck in a hole? Newsflash: you are. Astronomers call it the “local hole”, but that is quite the understatement. It is vast, gigantic, enormously huge – although, in truth, adjectives fail us when it comes to this expanse of nothingness. It is the largest cosmic void we know of, spanning 2 billion light years. Our galaxy happens to be near its centre, but the trouble with this hole isn’t that it presents a proximate danger – more that it shouldn’t exist at all.
That is, if one of our most firmly held beliefs about the cosmos…