And the earth was without form, and void;

and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

The article "Are we living in a giant cosmic void?" by Amanda Gefter talks about a recent paper, by Timothy Clifton, that suggests that we are living within a giant void in space, and that such a theory could replace the need for the mysterious 'dark matter'.

According to Clifton, the problem may not lie with cosmologists' observations, but with their assumptions - namely, the Copernican Principle, which says we don't occupy a special place in the cosmos, and that the distribution of matter is homogeneous, so any given region of the universe is more or less the same as any other.