This bubble is 10,000 times wider than the Milky Way and lies 820 million light-years from our galaxy.
An international team of astronomers has discovered for the first time the galactic bubble, an unimaginably gigantic cosmic structure one billion light years across that is believed to be the fossilized remains of the aftermath of the Big Bang.
The scientists who discovered it say the bubble is 10,000 times wider than the Milky Way. published Their find this week.
“This incredible bubble is a fossil from the Big Bang, when the universe formed 13 billion years ago,” team member Callan Howlett from the University of Queensland’s School of Mathematics and Physics said in a statement published Thursday. I mentioned it in.
“We weren’t even looking for it, but the structure was so huge that it spilled over to the edge of the area of sky we were analyzing,” Howlett said at the University of Queensland. said in an interview published by
“It dwarfs many of the largest known structures that actually form part of this bubble, such as the Sloan Great Wall and the Bootes Supercluster,” he says.
“What’s even more incredible is that it’s in our backyard,” he added.
The center of this bubble lies about 820 million light-years from our galaxy in what astronomers call the Neighborhood Universe.
Howlett said the discovery could revolutionize cosmology by providing a clearer picture of how fast the universe is expanding.
“Our analysis suggests that this bubble is larger than expected, so the universe is expanding even more than originally expected,” he said.
“We are now one step closer to major changes in the field of cosmology, and entire models of the universe may need to be reevaluated.”
“Nothing Great”
Team member Daniel Pomarade, an astrophysicist at the French Atomic Energy Commission, said the galactic bubble can be thought of as a “spherical shell with a heart.”
Inside its core lies the Booi supercluster of galaxies, surrounded by a vast void sometimes referred to as the “Great Nothing.”
This shell contains several other galactic superclusters already known to science, including the massive structure known as the Sloan Great Wall.
Pomarede said the discovery of the bubble, described in a study he co-authored published this week in the Astrophysical Journal, was “part of a very long scientific process.”
The discovery also confirms a phenomenon first reported in 1970 by Canadian-American cosmologist and future Nobel laureate in physics Jim Peebles.
He theorized that in the primordial universe (then a stew of hot plasma), the stirring of gravity and radiation produced sound waves called baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAOs).
When sound waves ripple through the plasma, bubbles are created.
About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, this process stopped when the universe cooled and the bubble shape froze. Then, like other fossilized remains after the Big Bang, the bubble grew larger as the universe expanded.
Astronomers previously detected BAO’s signal in 2005 when examining data from nearby galaxies. However, researchers say the newly discovered bubble is the first known single baryon acoustic vibration.
Astronomers call the bubble “Holeilana” (meaning “sending a murmur of awakening”), taking its name from a Hawaiian creation chant.
The name comes from the study’s lead author, astronomer Brent Talley of the University of Hawaii.