What is the dipole repeller? Why is it a dipole? What is it repelling? What is the Bootes Void and how is it connected to dark energy? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION (AUTO-GENERATED)
What's always drawn me to cosmology is the sense of of scale, of the universe. I mean, not even sci-fi can touch this stuff. In this episode, I'm gonna be casually dropping names of objects that are millions of light years across at a minimum. And these structures that I'm gonna talk about took billions of years to evolve. I mean, think of think of the the most crazy, outlandish sci-fi movie that takes place in the biggest setting possible. Like like Star Wars is across the entire galaxy. And there are 300 billion stars in a single galaxy, 300 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone. There's a trillion in the Andromeda Galaxy, and that's one galaxy in the nearest one. The our nearest neighbor galaxy is millions of light years away, 2.5 million light years away to get to Andromeda.
And that's just getting started with cosmology. That's just the beginning steps when I start building this map that we're going to get into to talk about today's topic, which is the dipole repeller. But that's actually gonna come at the very end, because we need a lot of set up. We're gonna start our initial picture is gonna start at a scale around 10 million light years across 10 million light years. Our nearest neighbor star to the sun is less than four light years away, and this is always drawn me. This is always just just the the weirdness of it that I can build a computer program to simulate the evolution of the universe, that I can write down an equation that describes the interaction between two Galaxies. That I can build a telescope and do a survey that maps out these structures.
And these things are bigger than I can literally comprehend. We're gonna talk about it and these things have names and they have physics and we can grapple with it and we can examine it and we can study it. But I can't imagine it. I cannot fit the universe in my mind. I cannot fit cosmology in my head. I can trust the mathematics. I can trust our observations. I can do all that stuff. But I, I can't comprehend it. And that contradiction is always enamored me. And in this episode, we're we are exploring that deep universe. We are gonna be naming things and describing things and exploring things that I can't even hope to wrap my head around. So we're just gonna have to go for on that ride. We're just gonna have to go into that world into that universe. We're just just here, take my hand and just trust me that, uh we know what we're talking about.
And we're doing it right, because when the scales get this big, they become literally unimaginable. So I want you throughout this entire episode to try to hang on to that sense of grandeur, that sense of scale, this sense of enormity, of what we're talking about. And we are going into the deep universe, but not that deep. We're going. We're not going to the scale of the whole entire universe, Not today. But we're definitely getting larger than, say, our own galaxy and immediate vicinity. We're going somewhere in between. You know, we've touched on cosmology topics before. We've talked about the evolution of the universe or dark energy. Uh, and those are deep, a huge cos you have to study the whole entire universe to to tease that kind of stuff out. We're going in this kind of middle range where we're looking at our neighborhood of the universe, where neighborhood is a box about 100 million light years across, and our knowledge of the deep universe comes from galaxy surveys.
It's amazingly straightforward. It it's not easy, but it's straightforward. You build a telescope, you point the telescope at the night sky, you find any Galaxies in your field of view, and you estimate their distance the distance to those Galaxies, which is kind of tricky. But we can do it, and then that's it. And you do it again and again. A different patch of sky, a different patch of sky. If you have a bigger telescope, you can push further into the universe than you can with a smaller telescope. And if you have a bigger telescope, you can. You can scan more of the nice guys so you can build a more complete map. It's just that straightforward. We're just putting Galaxies on a map like a little pin like 00, there's a galaxy. We're gonna put a pin there, another galaxy, a pin there, another galaxy, a pin there. Yes, cosmology is the realm where the fundamental unit, the little building block the little atom that we are using to build our cosmological model is an entire galaxy.
So that's just getting started with the scale and the region that we're talking about today. This region, our neighborhood within 100 million light years. It's, ironically, one of the hardest regions to explore, because when we go deep when we're doing these galaxy surveys with these big telescopes, it's very, very easy to go narrow and deep. You pick a tiny little spot on the sky and you zoom way in and you capture all the Galaxies along that line of sight. And there's an incredible amount of volume that you're capturing if you're just staring. If you imagine that that cone coming out of a telescope or or a straw or anything else that's that's long and narrow coming out of that telescope, you capture a lot of volume if you're looking very, very deep and so you actually end up exploring a lot of the universe by doing these very, very narrow surveys. But that's not gonna help us build a map of the nearby universe because the nearby universe you're only going to pick up a few Galaxies, not like a few 1000 Galaxies because you're not looking very far.
So imagine uh uh imagine you're in the middle of a forest and you're trying to build a map of the forest using just binoculars. And yeah, if you if you pick a clear patch If you see between a bunch of trees and you look really, really, really far, you can you can capture a lot of trees. You can see really far. You can maybe see the edge of the forest and you get a good map of If you're trying to build a map of your surroundings, it gets a lot harder because you need to survey the whole Skyy or the whole forest with this very narrow precision instrument. Uh, but of course, in astronomy, our problem isn't actually trees. It's dust. The dust in the Milky Way galaxy obscures our view of distant objects. It literally gets in the way. And so if you wanna go deep, if you wanna go into the very, very, very, very far universe and just capture a little sample there, you can just pick a patch on the sky that's relatively free of dust and go as deep as you want. But if you're trying to get your whole surroundings, you have to deal with the dust.
And one of the biggest sources of dust in the Milky Way galaxy is the center of the galaxy itself. Our core is a very big place. It has lots of dust, has lots of stars. Everything's bright, everything is annoying. It's like like trying to look through Manhattan and try to get a view of the other side like, Oh, yeah, there's a ship out in the Atlantic. Why don't you stand in New Jersey and look through Manhattan? And that's gonna be kind of challenging. And so we have a very, very fuzzy idea of our local universe in that direction so fuzzy that we have this awesome name for it. We call it the The Zone of Avoidance. Isn't that cool? I love that name, and you know, normally I have a hard time with names that astronomers and physicists have given to literally everything. But in this case, it gets a pass. Zone of avoidance is super cool. It's it just means when we try to look through the center of the galaxy, we have a really tough time anyway.
We first began making these kinds of maps of our local universe in the late 19 seventies early 19 eighties. That's when we had powerful enough telescopes we could start to build surveys. We started to, uh, to figure out where Galaxies were, and that's when we first realized that cosmic structures are a thing, you know, before that, we had known about Galaxies we had known about clusters of Galaxies, but we had assumed that everything was pretty much just scattered randomly. Just galaxy over here cluster over there. A cluster, by the way, is a grouping of 1000 Galaxies or more, and they're all gravitationally bound together. OK, there's a cluster, a group over there, a galaxy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But as we started to go deeper and we as we started to build these maps of our local neighborhood, we saw that there is a structure and the key point here, when we're trying to understand cosmic structure, is that we live in what's called a hierarchical universe. Galaxies are like Legos, and we use the Galaxies to build bigger things, just like you use small Legos to build even bigger things, So if you put a few Galaxies together, they become a group.
If you put a few groups together nearby, each other close enough, they become a cluster. And if you put a cluster together, you get a super cluster. Presumably, If given enough time, you could build a super duper cluster. But we're not quite there yet. And these structures aren't just scattered around remley. It's not groups over here. Clusters, superclusters. There is a pattern here, this pattern we call the cosmic Web, which we'll get to more in a bit. The maps of our local universe constantly change when we're constantly updated, as we get new techniques for seeing through the dust of our own galaxy. As we get better and better at piercing through the zone of avoidance, using things like infrared telescopes or radio telescopes, we can start to get a a sense of that. And then really, looking through any direction of the Milky Way is a little bit challenging because there's dust everywhere and so we get better and better. We get more and more surveys. We cover more and more of the volume around us, and we've got our pair of telescopes or Sorry, we've got our pair of binoculars inside the forest, and we're getting better and better at looking through the trees that are right next to us in order to get a sense of the forest that surrounds us.
The biggest unknowns, when it comes to these kinds of maps, are the outlines of the super clusters and the voids. The super clusters are hard to define anyway. There is no there is no strict definition of what a super cluster is like. I know what a group is. I know what a cluster is. These things are gravitationally bound. They are spherical blobs of Galaxies that just hang out together. The mutual gravity of all the Galaxies keeps them glued together. Super clusters are not gravitationally bound. They are not held together by their own gravity. And so you get to define what a super cluster is. Maybe it's it's It's this thing and oh, wait, wait. We're gonna have a new definition. We're gonna make it this thing. So as our definitions of super clusters evolve and refine, we get new maps, different groups, different researchers, different cosmologists will have different opinions about what is or is not a super cluster, and so they will have different maps of the nearby universe, different labels on the same things.
And then the voids are hard to define because they're kind of empty. We'll get to this more in a little bit, but I like to imagine the large scale structure of the universe as as like, a foam as a. You take in a bath and it gets all super foamy. There's the bubbles, and there's the places in between the bubbles, the actual soap, those are our super clusters. And then there's the bubbles themselves. They are just full of air. Those are the voids, and it's kind of hard to define an empty thing. There are various techniques, but those definitions change different groups who have different definitions of what is a void. What's not a void? What is This Edge of the void was the center of a void, and those different definitions produce different labels on the structures and and give us different maps. It's like if we had a hard time defining exactly what is a continent and what is an ocean. Different people are gonna have different labels for these things, for the same structures, the same maps. So let's begin our journey beyond the Milky Way and into the local group.
Never mind I. I can't keep that that kind of voice up. Listen, I know the weird voices are cheesy and cringy, but if you want me to stop, you're gonna have to pay me by going to patreon dot com slash PM Sutter, That's P MS U TT ER I really do appreciate all the contributions and is the best way to support the show. I, I can't do this without you. I really can't. Um And if you pay me enough, the cheesy cringy weird voices will go away. But maybe as a stretch goal, they'll at an even higher level. They'll come back. Yeah, I like that. Anyway, we're gonna expand. I want you to imagine zooming out with a camera like you're you got. You've got your picture and you can do that pinch zoomy thing. So we'll start with the most zoomed in view and we're gonna build a map of our local universe. This map is gonna start about 10 million light years across. That's right, we're starting. We're starting pinching in zooming in at our local patch of the universe with a box about 10 million light years across. That's our starting. We've got the Milky Way right. It's our home.
We live here. It's nice and big and juicy. It's a great galaxy favorite galaxy net over next door, right down the holler. About 2.5 million light years away is Andromeda. Our bigger sibling has about a trillion Galaxies. It's cool together with a third galaxy that nobody cares about called triangulum and a few dozen dwarf Galaxies that deserve their own episode. So just ask, uh, we make up something called the local group, which is a terrible name. But my submission as an eight year old of awesome Space town was apparently rejected by the International Astronomical Union. So local group it is these three big Galaxies and the dozens of dwarf Galaxies. We are all gravitationally glued together. This is the smallest chunk that we're gonna get a surrounding the local group. There is a ring of 11 Galaxies that it 11 to 16 million light years away. We call these the Council of Giants, which is a very awesome name. Eight year old me definitely approved of that.
If we go a little bit bigger, a little bit farther distance the nearest big thing to our local group, like like so near our local group are other groups of Galaxies. The nearest big thing is the Virgo cluster, about 60 million light years away. There's 1 to 2000 Galaxies and a roughly spherical. Um, well, sphere about 12 million light years across. So that's the size of the Virgo cluster. And the Virgo cluster itself sits about 60 million light years away. Surrounding the Virgo cluster are many other groups, like the Sculptor Group, the Centaurus Group, our group, the local group, this, um, our local group and all these other groups. They aren't part of the Virgo cluster itself. Um, but we are moving towards it. Uh, the gravity of the Virgo cluster is drawing in the local group and the other groups remember, this is a process that started billions of years ago as structures began to form we in their universe. In this hierarchical universe, structures grow from small to big.
So first thing you build is Galaxies, and then you build groups, and then the groups glued together to form clusters. We're not done forming yet. We're still heading towards the Virgo cluster. This process of construction has not finished yet. So all the groups nearby the Virgo Cluster are heading towards it. So that means we are a part of the Virgo supercluster complex. It's It's kind of like, how do you define the edge of a city like there are the city limits? But there are people who live just past the city limits, who go shopping in the city who work in this city who who go see shows in this city. So even though they're outside the city limits, they're still involved with the city and they're a part of the city. So when you're trying to define, uh, say the metropolitan area of a city, do do you include the suburbs or not? How far do you go? It's actually a very tricky question. You could say that the local group is a suburb of the Virgo cluster.
You could say we're in the Virgo greater metropolitan area, and there are lots of commuter trains between us and the Virgo cluster. We're connected to the Virgo cluster and same thing with all these other groups that surround the Virgo cluster. By the way, this is where the names will start to get a little bit funky. Usually these structures are just named after whatever constellation we had to look through to find them. But as we redrew the map, some names got merged or dropped or expanded, so it's a wonderfully confusing mishmash as we expand our zoom it. So we've got our our local group, a bunch of other groups that surround the Virgo cluster. We're part of the Virgo supercluster. If we expand our bubble about 100 million light years wide, we start to pick up more nearby clusters like the for this to cluster the anti cluster, the coma cluster and so on. And as we zoom out even further, we start to finally pick up the first threads of the cosmic web. This large structure, this foam of the universe, for example, the Virgo supercluster, which we're a part of, is itself a part of a larger super cluster called the Pisces CTU Super Cluster, which is a filament, which is a long, thin relatively than these things are 100 million light years wide, um, a long, thin rope of Galaxies.
You've got all these clusters in a line, and they all connect together in one long, uh, snakelike structure which we call a filament. And that filament itself is one branch of an even larger super cluster called the Lake Super Note. The ever shifting definition of Super cluster like we're in the Vigo Super Cluster. But the Virgo supercluster is a part of the pice Ceta Super cluster, which is a part of the lake supercluster. And that's because there's no rigid definition of structures at these scales. There's no one definition of super cluster, so anything bigger than a cluster gets gets called a super cluster. And so you have these nesting series of super clusters because as our surveys improve, we're like, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. The Virgo is part of a larger thing. It's got all these groups around it. Cool. That is the super cluster. Oh, no, no, no, no. Wait, wait, wait. We did some more mouse. We did some more surveys, and that thing is part of a bigger thing. So OK, now we'll call that the Super Cluster, the Pisces C, this super cluster.
And we did some more surveys and we're like, Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That's just one filament of a much larger, uh, branchlike structure. That's the Lake Super Cluster. Another example is Imagine looking at a tree and you zoom in on one tiny little twig. And that's our Virgo cluster or Virgo Super cluster. And then you zoom out and you see it's a it's connected to a larger branch. You're like, Oh, OK, I see. I'm just a little twig of a larger branch called the Pisces Super Cluster. And then you zoom out and you see that branch is connected to a really, really, really big branch. You say, Oh, OK, that's the super cluster. That's the A super super close. So we're one tiny little twig connected to a branch connected to a huge branch, which we call the A a super cluster. And keep in mind that twig contains thousands of Galaxies and is about 100 million light years across that tiny little twig. In this structure. When we zoom out again and look at our patch of the universe about 1 to 2 billion light years across, we're at the point where individual Galaxies lose their definition.
They're just tiny points of light. Even clusters become embarrassingly small. At this scale, it's just super clusters. Now when you zoom out, when you look at the universe 1 to 2 billion light years across All you see are super clusters, which are arranged like giant filaments in sheets and walls, each hundreds of millions of light years long like the soap bubbles. So you've zoomed out of the foam enough where you've lost the definition of where that each individual bubble intersects. You've lost that, and you just see this interconnected network of foam of of walls and filaments that intersect each other and cut each other off. And that is it. That is our universe. There is nothing bigger. There are no larger structures than these super clusters, these filaments and walls and sheets. There's nothing bigger. This is the scale of what we call homogeneity, which I've done an episode about.
Basically, you don't get anything bigger than super clusters. There are no super duper clusters in our universe. This pattern that we see of super clusters connecting with each other, these filaments and sheets and walls all connecting with each other. It just repeats endlessly across the universe surrounding Lake. Our home supercluster are some other massive structures, like the shapely Super Cluster, the Coma Super Cluster, the Perseus Pisces Super Cluster and beyond them are more super clusters further away from us hundreds of millions of light years away. The Hercules, the Leo, the Ursa Major, the Pavo indi Beyond that, the super clusters don't get individual names. They just get catalog designations, even if they're even cataloged at all. Unless some of these super structures, these super clusters, do get cool names if they really stick out like there's something called the Sloan Great Wall, go ahead and ask about that if you want.
But other than that, it's just cosmic web. So we've given names to the parts of the foam of the cosmic web that live near us, and then everything else is just data points. Before I continue, I want to take a quick break and let you know that this podcast is sponsored by better help online therapy. And today I want to talk about burnout. Burnout happens all the time when it's just too overwhelming to keep going. It happens to me when I work too much or get stressed out. I just want to stare at a wall for a while or a tree or something, and I can't get motivated to to do anything useful. And, yeah, podcasts like this are great to alleviate burnout. You can get lost in the wonders and mysteries of the universe, just like I do. And it's fantastic. But But just like me, maybe you should also talk to a professional. Try better health. It's customized online therapy. They do video, phone and even live chat sessions with your therapist.
It's It's real, it's real and it's affordable, and you can be batched with a therapist in under 48 hours. Give it a shot. Ask if spaceman listeners get 10% off their first month at better. Help dot com slash spaceman. That's BE TT ER HE LP dot com slash spaceman Go ahead, give it a shot. But there's more to it than the groups and the clusters and the super clusters. When you zoom out at this foam like structure and you see all these interconnected superclusters and all their intricate shapes and all the filaments and walls and sheets, there's something else and Those are the voids. You can't have soap bubbles without bubbles. You you can't have the foam without the empty space. You can't have a spider web without gaps. You can't have Swiss cheese without the holes. There are hierarchies of structures in our universe, of groups to clusters to superclusters and then bigger superclusters.
And there are hierarchies of voids. There are empty patches surrounding and bordering all of these structures. There's the local void right next to us, which is 100 million light years across. I will say that again there is something called the local void, which is not entirely empty. But compared to the super clusters. It's very empty, a desert 100 million light years across nearby, There's also the sculptor void, the canIs major void, the bodes void. The bodes void deserves a special mention. Another name for it is the great nothing. It is 330 million light years in diameter. It was once thought to be so big that it violated our understanding of the growth of structure in the universe. Turns out it's not the case. The great nothing 330 million light years across, not totally empty just like deserts aren't totally barren, but compared to a rain forest, they are so at the very largest scales you have these networks of super clusters and voids.
These super clusters wrap around the voids. The voids are these giant empty bubbles, and then the boundaries of these bubbles where the bubbles intersect. Those are the super clusters. And so we give names to the super clusters, the branches of the Super cluster, the pieces of the filaments of the cosmic Web. And I know it's taken me a long time to get here, and this episode really is 90% set up and 10% payoff. But that's just where the cosmological muse took me. Today we're finally at a stage where we can talk about the dipole repeller because I could have just walked in and said, Hey, the dipole repeller is a giant void, but I want to build up to it because of the scale that it deserves. We think the dipolar repeller exists. We're not sure. Like I said at the beginning, surveys of our local volume of the universe are very, very difficult. We have a very fuzzy picture of our universe, all told by the way, all galaxy surveys combined have mapped out less than, like half a percent of the volume of the universe.
Just food for thought. We get a sense that maybe the dipole repeller exists through the motions of Galaxies. That's right. Galaxies move, which is another one of those things where I have such a hard time imagining. I I'm I'm kind of OK. With planets moving, I can accept that stars move, but Galaxies moving entire the entire mass of the Milky Way galaxy is bucking it. 600 kilometers per second is not slow. So we look at the motions of Galaxies to tell us about structures that we can't see Why? Because even if we can't see it, if there's an object that is too obscured by dust for us to see, we can't see in that direction very well. We can't map out the Galaxies individually. It still has gravity. The gravity still influences us. And so, by studying the motion of the Milky Way by studying the motion of Andromeda in the local group and even the viral cluster itself in all of the Galaxies that we can map out if we can study their motions.
We can build a map of hidden objects even if we can't see them directly because we know their gravity is there and their gravity influences our motion. So, for example, we are moving towards Andromeda, US and Andromeda, the entire local group. We are being gravitationally pulled towards the Virgo cluster, the Virgo cluster itself and the Virgo Supercluster complex. The Virgo greater metropolitan area itself is moving in a direction of space known as the Greater Tractor. The gray tractor is centered on a cluster called the Norma Cluster, the largest cluster in our local patch of the universe. The great tractor itself is moving. There is something behind into the side of the grade tractor, another chunk of space, Um, where a Kia itself, our entire supercluster complex and even some nearby super clusters are moving to This region of space is centered on the shapely super cluster.
Uh, this is relatively speculative. It's based on limited evidence, but it it's there. I'm pretty sure by looking at the motions of all these things. Imagine the shapely supercluster is large enough and has enough gravity that it's influencing the motion of everything surrounding it even entire superclusters, its neighboring superclusters, are being drawn to it because it's so gigantic. So we're being pulled towards the shapely supercluster. But with some more surveys, we were able to map out the shapely supercluster and estimate its best. And there's not enough stuff in there to explain the motion. In other words, the gravity of the shapely super cluster is not enough to explain how quickly we are moving towards it. Instead, there has to be something else. There has to be something pushing us from the opposite direction. This is the dipole repeller, our entire chunk of space. 100 million light years across the AA supercluster, our home supercluster, of which we are just one tiny little twig of a branch of a branch of that super cluster, is moving in bulk en masse towards the shapely super cluster.
We are headed on a collision course, but the gravity of the shapely supercluster by itself is not enough to explain how quickly we're moving towards it. We are being pushed by something, and we call this the the dipole repeller. We suspect that this might be an indication of a new, previously undiscovered void possibly a super void if such a thing exists. We know of the voids nearby us, right? I rattled off some of their names. The local void, the sculptor void, the canIs major void, the boda void. There's a new void sitting beyond them on the opposite direction of the universe as the shapely supercluster, so shapely superclusters over here, La a K is in the middle. And then we think this dipole repeller void is on the opposite side, and we think it's big. We have not mapped it out again. Mapping voids is kind of hard because they're empty. Our surveys of the local universe have not finished. We do not have very confident maps out here, so we can only guess that's something you say.
So how does a void push you? How does the void push you? Great question. How does the dipole repeller void become the dipole repeller? Oh, it's called dipole because we're being pulled towards the shapely and pushed by this giant void. And there's two poles, one of attraction, one of repulsion so dipole two poles, dipolar repeller. There's two ways a void can push you, and a patch of empty space can push you one if you just have a uniform. If you say, say you fill up the universal Galaxies and it's uniform everywhere, you stick yourself in the random patch of that, uh, the gravity of all the Galaxies will will cancel each other out, like you'll be pulled in one direction from all the Galaxies over there. But you also be pulled in the opposite direction because of all the Galaxies over there, it all balances out, but then you carve a hole in it and you plunk yourself right on the edge of that hole. Then, on one side, you'll be attracted by all the Galaxies on that side. But there's nothing to the other side of you, so you'll get pushed because there's nothing there to balance it out.
So there's an extra little boost you get from having an empty patch. The other thing is dark energy. You see, voids aren't they are empty in the sense of matter, but they're actually full when it comes to dark. Energy. Voids are the places where dark energy lives in our universe. Dark energy is this accelerated expansion of the cosmos. But here, sitting on earth, we don't feel the effects of dark energy because the gravity of the earth, the electromagnetic forces that we feel all of those overwhelm the power of dark energy. We don't see in the effects of dark energy here in the solar system because there's enough stuff. There's enough matter, and the gravity of all that matter totally swamps out dark energy. We don't sense dark energy on galactic scales because there's more than enough stuff inside of a galaxy. We don't sense it. Even on cluster scales or group scales, you go out and avoid where there's hardly anything. That means there's nothing left but dark energy and dark energy is repulsive. Antigravity is a real thing. Gravity can push.
Gravity can be re repulsive. It is it can. That's how dark energy works. That's how we get the accelerated expansion in the universe because dark energy is a feature of the vacuum of space. Time itself, we think, and when you get rid of everything else, you still are left with dark energy, and dark energy pushes these giant voids that surround us. The local void, the boda void, this dipole repeller void are literally pushing on the surrounding matter. The voids are getting bigger. The voids are expanding in the process. They are causing the entire universe to accelerate in its expansion. And in the process, they're pushing on all the super clusters. They're actually gonna eventually dissolve them. Uh, we are headed towards the Virgo cluster. We'll never reach it. Dark energy someday in the future will rip us apart. Eventually, the A K, a supercluster will get torn apart. The Virgo supercluster will get torn apart. The groups and the clusters will survive. There's enough gravity there. There's enough stuff there to counteract dark energy.
But everything else is gonna get ripped to shreds. And we're seeing this process play out in real time, were being pushed by the dipole repeller void and were being pulled by the shapely supercluster. Eventually, eventually, dark energy will win. Shapely will get too far away from us. The expansion of the universe will carry it away from us, will slow down and stop. All of this gorgeous, beautiful filament foam network of super clusters will get dissolved because on the biggest scales, you can't ignore the power of the boy. Thank you to at carpe witz on Twitter and Erica C on email for the questions that led to today's episode Thank you to all my Patreon contributors. That's patreon dot com slash PM Sutter, please go to patreon dot com slash PM. Sutter is the best way to support this show. I'd like to thank my top contributors this month. Justin G, Chris L, Barbara K Duncan M Coy D, Justin Z, Nate H, Andrew F, NAIA Aaron S, Scott M, Rob H, Lowell T, Justin Lewis M Paul G, John W, Alexis Aaron J, Jennifer M, Gilbert M, Tomm B, Joshua Kurt M and Bob H Those are the top contributors this month.
Join their ranks at patreon dot com slash PM. Sutter hit me, hit me up with some more questions at hashtag. Ask us spaceman. Ask us spaceman at gmail dot com. Follow me on all social channels at Paul. Matt Sutter. Go to my website. Ask us spaceman dot com That's a fun place to visit as you're contemplating these absolutely gigantic scales and I will see you next time for more complete knowledge of time and space