Interesting how anisotropic it is. Naively I would have assumed it would be roughly symmetrical

epistasis 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As others say, this is probably mostly artifacts from the survey design (e.g. eROSITA data rights), but the Galactic plane definitely limits things too.

This video of the DESI galactic map shows the directions that are possible to survey with optical light, in a very cool way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSTGiRLWzS4

▲

mynegation 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Interesting indeed but might be an artifact of regions being surveilled and Milky Way disk both containing more easily detectable holes and obscuring some areas with the dust clouds (I am not an astrophysicist or astronomer)

	▲	smolder 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Supermassive black holes are generally at the center of galaxies, like a tiny yolk in an egg. That's not a hard rule. For instance, they can theoretically be ejected and make a mess if a few galaxies collide. But yes, it's harder to detect far away objects when the bulk of our milky way is in the way, making things milky. I suspect there are a lot of black holes back there that we just can't see.

▲

monocasa 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think that's more a result of our incomplete/inconsistent scanning.

▲

gwerbin 3 hours ago | parent [-]

On the other hand, the ancients assumed there had to be big continents in the southern and western hemispheres to "balance" the land in their own quadrant.

They turned out to be right, but not quite for the reasons they put forth.

As a non-cosmologist, I'm unwilling to speculate on what "should" be out there, because my mental model is probably very wrong (keeping in mind that our best models of what's happening out there are also probably quite wrong).

	▲	monocasa 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Well, in more formal terms, cosmology has the 'cosmological principle'[0], which is a conjecture that at large enough scales, the universe is universally isotropic and homogenous wrt the distribution of matter. Basically that it should average out to the same density everywhere, and should look basically the same in terms of how much matter there is from wherever you pick. There'd be a lot of cosmology glory in proving that wrong. They'd put your name before Hubble's. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle
	▲	smolder 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Luck of the draw that they weren't lizard people on pangea, making that prediction.

▲

honeycrispy 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Nature is a painting, not a pattern.