Astronomers have found fresh evidence that Earth and our Milky Way galaxy are suspended inside a gigantic void. The void is a 2 billion-light-year region that's 20% less dense than average. The findings could help astronomers find the true age of our universe and offer a solution to the Hubble tension. The researchers shared their findings at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Durham, England. The Hubble tension is a discrepancy in the expansion rate of the universe, with different methods yielding different values. The standard model of cosmology predicts a value of 67 km/s/Mpc, but measurements of closer distances return a higher value of 73.2 km/s/Mpc. The anomaly could be specific to our cosmic backyard, with our galaxy being close to the center of a large, local void. The researchers collected 20 years' of data from observations of nearby baryon acoustic oscillations to investigate the evidence further. According to the researchers' BAO measurements, it's 100 times more likely that we live in a cosmic void than a region of average density.

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