2 - Preview of the Discovery of Cosmic Voids

Summary

An overview is presented of the breakthroughs that led to the discovery of cosmic voids and supercluster structure in the galaxy distribution and of those who did the work. The first step was the introduction of the image intensified camera to observatories in Arizona and its early use in the spectroscopy of galaxies. After a sufficient number of galaxy redshifts were collected, 3D maps of the local Universe were created. These maps revealed the dramatic structure including cosmic voids. Next, theoretical models were proposed to explain the observed structure. This step included a face-off between bottom-up evolutionary models in the west and top-down models from the USSR. As the models matured, it was recognized that normal matter (baryons) were insufficient to explain the observed structure in the galaxy distribution and that dark matter was a necessary new constituent. In recent years, cosmic voids have become a tool for precision cosmology.