Bootes anchors the spring sky with Arcturus, but far beyond that single bright star, in the same general direction as seen from Earth, lies something the ancient tradition had no way to notice at all: an enormous region of space containing almost no galaxies.
The Bootes Void, identified in 1981 by the American astronomers Robert Kirshner, Gus Oemler, Paul Schechter and Stephen Shectman while mapping galaxy positions and distances, is a roughly spherical region of space several hundred million light years across containing far fewer galaxies than the surrounding volume, so few that it was nicknamed the Great Nothing. Galaxies are not spread evenly through the universe; they cluster along filaments and sheets around still emptier gaps, and the Bootes Void is simply an unusually large example of that emptiness, sitting along the same line of sight as the herdsman without having any physical connection to the stars that give the constellation its shape.
The void's existence says nothing about Bootes the star pattern, since every star in the constellation is many thousands of times closer to Earth than the void itself; the two occupy the same direction in the sky and nothing else. It is nonetheless the reason a professional astronomer hearing "Bootes" is at least as likely to think of a nearly empty patch of the distant universe as of a bear-driving herdsman.