Laird A. Thompson (born 6 September 1947), is a professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Thompson graduated with a B.A. in both physics and astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1969. He received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Arizona in 1974.He is professionally associated with the International Astronomical Union, the American Astronomical Society, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the International Society for Optical Engineering, and has served as an adjunct member of the Center for Adaptive Optics.
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Laird A. Thompson in the context of Void (astronomy)
Cosmic voids (also known as dark space) are vast spaces between filaments (the largest-scale structures in the universe), which contain very few or no galaxies. In spite of their size, most galaxies are not located in voids. This is because most galaxies are gravitationally bound together, creating huge cosmic structures known as galaxy filaments. The cosmological evolution of the void regions differs drastically from the evolution of the universe as a whole: there is a long stage when the curvature term dominates, which prevents the formation of galaxy clusters and massive galaxies. Hence, although even the emptiest regions of voids contain more than ~15% of the average matter density of the universe, the voids look almost empty to an observer.
Voids typically have a diameter of 10 to 100 megaparsecs (30 to 300 million light-years); particularly large voids, defined by the absence of rich superclusters, are sometimes called supervoids. They were first discovered in 1978 in a pioneering study by Stephen Gregory and Laird A. Thompson at the Kitt Peak National Observatory.
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