The WRONG image everyone uses for the Boötes Void #shorts

This is one of my biggest pet peeves as an astrophysicist who does a lot of science communication - I notice things like this that are just wrong that are doing all of you a disservice. This is a real image, it’s of a very cool astronomical object, Barnard 68, it is a Bok Globule - essentially a special type of nebula which is so dense, with so much gas and dust blocking starlight it looks completely dark. And Barnard 68 is only around 400 light years away - astronomically speaking, that’s our back garden - which is why the image of it is really striking. And my big pet peeve is that people constantly use Barnard 68 to represent something completely different known as the Bootes void - a region of space with way less galaxies than normal. Galaxies: entire islands of 100s of billions of stars billions of light years away. And when we map out the positions of those galaxies we see the structure of the Universe pop out looking like a sponge. And like a sponge, you get holes or voids in this structure of galaxies. The Bootes void is one of the biggest of these, it’s a rough sphere about 200 million light years across and contains only 60 galaxies, rather than the 2000 you’d expect in a region that big. And because it's so big, and behind so many other stars and galaxies, we can’t really get a picture of it. All we can really do is make a map of the Universe and show X marks the spot. But that doesn’t look impressive for online articles and YouTube thumbnails; so much to my intense frustration, Barnard 68 is incorrectly used as a handy stand-in. It’s like using a picture of a grain of sand to represent an alien planet, it doesn’t make any sense! Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: [email protected] Video produced by Marina Hui & Dr Becky Smethurst --- 📚 My book, "A Brief History of Black Holes", out NOW in hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook (which I narrated myself!): http://lnk.to/DrBecky --- 👕 My merch, including JWST designs, are available here (with worldwide shipping!): https://dr-becky.teemill.com/ --- 🎧 Royal Astronomical Society Podcast that I co-host: podfollow.com/supermassive --- 🔔 Don't forget to subscribe and click the little bell icon to be notified when I post a new video! --- 👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars. http://drbecky.uk.com