CentralNotice From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation , search Matter distribution in a cubic section of the Universe. The blue fiber structures represent the matter (primarily dark matter) and the empty regions in between represent the cosmic voids. Cosmic voids are vast spaces between filaments (the largest-scale structures in the Universe ), which contain very few or no galaxies . Voids typically have a diameter of 10 to 100 megaparsecs ; particularly large voids, defined by the absence of rich superclusters , are sometimes called supervoids . They have less than one-tenth of the average density of matter abundance that is considered typical for the observable Universe . They were first discovered in 1978 in a pioneering study by Stephen Gregory and Laird A. Thompson at the Kitt Peak National Observatory . [1] Voids are believed to have been f...