violet

you hear a flurry of clicking and tapping getting louder from zhe ozher side of zhe door

it bursts open. it's me, wearing a lab coat, holding zhe door open wizh my twiggy grabbyhand and panting

i zhrow a zhing at you, sitting upon your chair in zhe middle of zhis empty room, and bolt away

wyd

i am stunned and perplexed. idek what you gave me but if you trust me with it then i guess i'll take good care of it for now....

zhe American Physical Society had a really good gender selection area on zhis recent survey

Abyss isn't just my handle - it's the name i use in real life! When i give my name at cafes and such i always go "Abyss, like the ocean place" but it's really a space thing (surprising absolutely nobody)

But to talk about that, we gotta build up to it so strap in, we're goin on a trip

So we live on a planet orbiting a star, right? Y'all knew that... i hope. That star is the Sun, or Sol depending on who you ask (i like the latter) and i figure if we're zooming out i might as well give all the names for the things that we're in because it's fun! There will not be a test don't worry

Sol is in a galaxy, the Milky Way that everyone needs to see properly at least once in their lives (i have a story about that too but that's for another time)! This should be review for most folks but like, good to make sure we're all on the same page.

(it's actually hard to NOT type zh's. y'all better appreciate this)

Now, we keep zooming out, right? Most folks will know Andromeda through some reason or another, and a few of you might even know the Magellanic Clouds - Andromeda is a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way, the Large Cloud is a fun subtype of spiral galaxy with only one arm, and the Small Cloud is a fun Irregular (basically just a blob of stars)

But the Local Group (yes that's what it's called. sometimes the naming astronomers come up with bad names and we just have to deal with it) has a lot more galaxies than that! We know 80ish, and there's probably more but it's hard to see through all the gunk in the Milky Way.

image: Antonio Ciccolella, CC BY-SA 4.0

that's the Local Group! it's pretty big, all things considered, but also pretty cozy. I like it here, anyway! But we got plany of space to keep zooming out -

This next part gets messy, a bit. For a while we thought that we lived in a big collection of groups and clusters called the Virgo Supercluster, but it turns out that that's just a section of the Laniakea Supercluster! So we're in the Virgo SC but the Virgo SC is just a lobe of the Laniakea SC so we're in both. It's like ogres.

Sidebar, Laniakea is Hawaiian for "open skies" so sometimes the naming committee gets it right

image: Andrew Z. Colvin, CC BY-SA 4.0

that's Laniakea! It's honestly amazing to me that we can produce maps like this of things so... mind-bogglingly big, and I'm in this field!! the entire Local Group is barely visible, and the Milky Way is smaller than a pixel at this scale - i cannot stress enough how zoomed out we are right now. absolutely incomprehensible distances.

but.

we're not done yet.

it KEEPS GOING

you see how Laniakea almost looks like it's two strings hooked on each other?

image: Richard Powell, CC BY-SA 2.5

this scale is just. enormous. 1 billion light-years across - THREE HUNDRED MEGAPARSECS. galactic clusters are organized in these thread-like structures called filaments, and you can definitely see why. superclusters tend to form where the filaments intersect, and as expected the Virgo Supercluster is at an intersection. filaments are named, sometimes! some "walls" are on the diagram

but, what about between the filaments?

what's there?

the answer, dear reader

is nothing.

as close to nothing as anything could possibly be in this universe.

there is not enough Stuff there to even start to form galaxies.

it's empty.

these are called voids, and they're my happy place.

unfortunately, naming myself Void was a bit much even for me, so Abyss it is :3