Earth and our galaxy were placed inside a mysterious giant hole

Scientists claim that the Earth and our entire Milky Way galaxy may be located inside a mysterious giant hole. One of the most difficult mysteries of science is the fact that the universe is currently expanding faster than it was immediately after the Big Bang. But now scientists claim that they have found a surprising solution to this decades-old problem. According to them, the Earth, the solar system and the entire Milky Way are located near the center of a giant mysterious hole.

Because space is expanding faster in this local void than anywhere else in the universe, it creates the illusion that the expansion is accelerating, writes the Daily Mail. This radical solution could help solve the problem that scientists call the "Hubble tension," but it is not without its problems. Most importantly, our standard view of the universe assumes that matter should be distributed fairly evenly throughout space, without any massive holes.

However, new research presented at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting claims the "sound of the Big Bang" supports this theory.

According to these new observations, the probability that we are in a void is 100 million times higher than the probability that we are not.

The Hubble tension is due to something called the Hubble constant, which reflects how quickly the universe is expanding outwards, the Daily Mail explains. We measure this by looking at objects like galaxies and working out how far away they are and how fast they are moving away.

The problem arises when we go back to the early Universe, measuring light from extremely distant objects.

Based on our best theories about the Universe, these early observations give a very different value for the Hubble constant than current measurements.

Dr Indranil Banik, an astronomer at the University of Portsmouth, told MailOnline: "In particular, the rate of expansion today is about 10 per cent faster than expected. The current rate of expansion is a key parameter in any cosmological model, so this is a really big problem. Imagine two different measurements of the length of your living room differing by 10 per cent, but both rulers were made by reputable companies. It's like that, but for the entire Universe."

Dr. Banik's new solution to this problem is to suggest that only objects near Earth are accelerating faster, rather than the entire universe. This may be because the Milky Way is near the center of a low-density void about a billion light years across and about 20 percent less dense than the universe as a whole.

If there was a large region with very little matter inside, objects in the hole would be pulled by gravity toward the denser regions at the edges, the Daily Mail continues. As the void filled, objects would move away from Earth faster than they otherwise would, creating the illusion that the expansion of the universe was speeding up.

If this could be proven, it would solve the Hubble problem without having to add any additional factors, such as Dark Energy, to explain why the Universe is accelerating.

The only problem, as the Daily Mail points out, is that the standard model of the Universe generally assumes that matter should be fairly evenly distributed over such large scales.

But Dr. Banik says recent observations of the "Bing bag sound" support the idea. In the first few seconds after the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe was in the form of a super-hot plasma made up of photons and particles called baryons. When this plasma was compressed by gravity, it bounced back, sending acoustic "sound" waves through space.

As the universe cooled, these waves froze in place and formed a regular pattern of peaks and troughs in the distribution of galaxies, known as baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs). In a large local void where space is expanding rapidly, these waves will appear closer than they should be.

Dr Banik says the latest BAO measurements are more consistent with the existence of a void than with a smooth universe: "Based on all the BAO measurements over the last twenty years, the local void model is about a hundred million times more likely than no void."