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…
