The Connection Among the Void in the Universe, Dark Energy and the Big Bang

First, I'd like to state that I am not an astronomer. I simply have an interest in the subject, and all information here is gleaned through my own research.

We all know about the Big Bang theory, I'll assume - how all matter and energy, space and time were supposedly squished into a single point and then exploded into existence, sending everything outward at a (relatively) equal velocity. How everything is still expanding outward and we're unsure whether the Universe will keep expanding or eventually shrink back on itself.

Taking the Big Bang theory at its face value, where an equal amount of force was exerted outward on everything, matter should have been evenly dispersed. The existence of celestial bodies disproves this part, however. Gases and dust form larger clumps of gas and dust and make nebulae, which, according to the Accretion Theory, rotate into giant disc-clouds, and condense. The resulting disc forms the star and/or planets surrounding it. Not all stars have planets, obviously, but I'm using our own solar system as an example. More and more stars and systems attract one another to create galaxies, galactic clusters, etc.

However, the Big Bang wasn't a perfect spherical explosion, necessarily. At least, not as we know it. We can't truthfully say what it was - but let's assume that matter was haphazardly flung outward. Incidentally, all the matter that was formed was pure hydrogen, the lightest and simplest element. The other elements formed from fusion of hydrogen nuclei, like helium, lithium, carbon, etc. The heavier elements formed from fusion of hydrogen and helium, or were eventually to. Either way, this partially can explain why matter is clumped together in stars and other bodies.

Now we come to the recent disovery: a gap in the Universe a billion lightyears wide. Don't try to comprehend that distance - your brain will likely explode from such a large number. A lightyear, for the uninitiated, is the distance light travels in a year. At 300,000 kilometres per second, that amounts to about 9.5 trillion kilometres per year. Multiply that by a billion, and you get 9.5 x 10^21 kilometres. That's how much space is supposedly empty of almost everything. There are no stars or anything in this void to give off measurable radiation, according to Daily Science in the University or Minnesota's news release.
There are semi-voids in the Universe, to be sure, but there has never been a discovery of one so large or complete. It seems to go against everything known about cosmological principle.

The cosmological principle states that the Universe is, on large scales, homogenous (composed of the same types of material) and isotropic (the same everywhere, no matter where you look). In turn, this would imply that the Universe would appear smooth on a similarly large scale, as opposed to fractal-like.
In other words, things like this void simply shouldn't exist.

Enter dark energy, or as some theories put it, the cosmological constant. This holds that there's a set amount of mass-energy in the Universe, unchanged. The matter we're familiar with, hydrogen, helium, all the heavier elements, make up about four percent of the total. Dark matter takes 20%, and the rest is this dark energy, which is spread, supposedly, throughout space evenly. So even in the absence of matter, there's energy. Dark energy is, for lack of a better word, anti-gravity. It presses outward on the surrounding matter, which is causing the acceleration in the expansion of the Universe, according to theories. Dark energy is detectable by inference of gravity and the microwave background of the universe. Given that there exists this giant void, it can only be thought that there should be a collection of dark energy. Because gravity would have attracted the objects around the void toward one another, the dark energy of the void had more space of its own, and thereby more energy. It then pushed outward, becoming a greater and greater force.

The void could be seen as a precursor to a theory termed 'The Big Rip'. This theory has to do with the ultimate fate of the Universe, which depends on the ratio of mass density to critical density (or dark energy). If the mass density, or the total amount of normal mass, is higher than this critical density, then the Universe will collapse back on itself. If equal, it will approach zero expansion. If the mass density is less than the critical density, the Universe will expand infinitely.

With dark energy in the equation, the expansion would go faster and faster with time, eventually going so fast that all particles would be ripped apart down to the quark. The question of whether this may already have happened in the void deserves a closer look.

Sources:

1. R.A Alpher and R. Herman (1948). "Evolution of the Universe". Nature 162: 774.
2. P. J. E. Peebles and Bharat Ratra (2003). "The cosmological constant and dark energy". Reviews of Modern Physics 75: 559-606