Earth and our entire Milky Way galaxy may sit inside a mysterious giant hole which makes the cosmos expand faster here than in neighboring regions of the universe, astronomers say.

Their theory is a potential solution to the “Hubble tension” and could help confirm the true age of our universe, which is estimated to be around 13.8 billion years old.

The latest research —shared at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2025) at Durham University—shows that sound waves from the early universe, “essentially the sound of the Big Bang,” support this idea.