The Void Between Stars

The universe is mostly nothing. Between every atom, between every star, between every galaxy lies an incomprehensible emptiness that makes up 99.9999999% of everything that exists. You are reading this on a thin film of matter floating in an ocean of void.

The Emptiness of Atoms

99.9999999%

If you removed all the empty space from every atom in every human on Earth, the remaining matter would fit inside a sugar cube. Yet that sugar cube would still weigh 7 billion times a human body.

The atom itself is a study in emptiness. If the nucleus were the size of a marble placed at the center of a football stadium, the electrons would orbit somewhere in the parking lot. Everything in between is void, held together only by electromagnetic forces and the strange rules of quantum mechanics.

Intergalactic Void

1 atom/m³

The space between galaxies contains roughly one atom per cubic meter. For comparison, the air you breathe has about 25,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules per cubic centimeter. The void is patient. The void is vast.

These intergalactic spaces are the loneliest places in existence. A photon traveling through such regions might journey for millions of years without encountering a single particle of matter. In these cosmic deserts, time itself seems to lose meaning, as nothing happens and nothing changes.

The Boötes Void

330 million ly

There exists a spherical region of space 330 million light-years across that contains almost nothing. The Boötes Void is so empty that if the Milky Way were at its center, we would not have known other galaxies existed until the 1960s.

Discovered in 1981, this supervoid challenges our understanding of cosmic structure. While the average density of galaxies in the universe suggests there should be about 2,000 galaxies in this region, astronomers have found only about 60. The Boötes Void is a cosmic mystery, a hole in the fabric of galactic distribution that should not exist according to standard models.

Quantum Foam

Even the void is not truly empty. At the smallest scales, space itself seethes with virtual particles popping in and out of existence. The vacuum is not nothing - it is the potential for everything.

This quantum foam, as physicist John Wheeler called it, represents the fundamental turbulence of spacetime at the Planck scale. Virtual particle pairs constantly emerge from nothing, exist for impossibly brief moments, then annihilate each other. This is not theoretical speculation - it has been measured as the Casimir effect and observed in vacuum fluctuations.

The Philosophy of Nothing

Throughout human history, philosophers and scientists have grappled with the concept of nothing. The ancient Greeks debated whether a true vacuum could exist. Aristotle famously declared nature abhors a vacuum, a principle that dominated Western thought for nearly two millennia. It was not until the scientific revolution that we began to understand the true nature of emptiness.

Today, we know that what we call nothing is far more complex than the absence of something. The quantum vacuum teems with energy and potential. Dark energy, the mysterious force accelerating the expansion of the universe, permeates all of space. Even in the most perfect vacuum we can create, virtual particles continue their eternal dance of creation and annihilation.

Perhaps the most profound realization is this: we are made of void. The atoms that compose your body are overwhelmingly empty space. The solid ground beneath your feet is mostly nothing, held together by forces we still do not fully understand. In a very real sense, you are a pattern of information imposed upon an ocean of emptiness, a brief arrangement of matter in a universe that is almost entirely void.

The Observable Universe

4%

Of everything that exists in the observable universe, ordinary matter - the stuff of stars, planets, and people - makes up only about 4%. Dark matter accounts for roughly 27%, and dark energy comprises the remaining 69%. We are a minority ingredient in a recipe we do not understand.

The vast majority of the universe is made of substances we cannot see, cannot touch, and barely comprehend. We detect dark matter only through its gravitational effects on visible matter. Dark energy is even more mysterious, known only through its influence on the expansion rate of the cosmos. In the grand accounting of existence, we are a rounding error.

The Heat Death

10¹⁰⁰ years

In the far future, the universe will reach maximum entropy. All stars will have burned out, all black holes will have evaporated through Hawking radiation, and the cosmos will be a cold, dark expanse of isolated particles, each separated by distances greater than the current observable universe.

This is the ultimate void - not the emptiness between stars, but the emptiness that remains when even the stars are gone. No light, no heat, no change, no time in any meaningful sense. Just an infinite sea of nothing, forever. And yet, even then, quantum fluctuations may persist, carrying the faintest whisper of potential in an otherwise silent cosmos.