We Exist Inside a Giant Space Bubble, And Scientists Have Finally Mapped It (vice.com) 39
Becky Ferreira writes via Motherboard: You may not realize it in your day-to-day life, but we are all enveloped by a giant "superbubble" that was blown into space by the explosive deaths of a dozen-odd stars. Known as the Local Bubble, this structure extends for about 1,000 light years around the solar system, and is one of countless similar bubbles in our galaxy that are produced by the fallout of supernovas. Cosmic superbubbles have remained fairly mysterious for decades, but recent astronomical advances have finally exposed key details about their evolution and structure. Just within the past few years, researchers have mapped the geometry of the Local Bubble in three dimensions and demonstrated that its surface is an active site of star birth, because it captures gas and dust as it expands into space.
Now, a team of scientists has added another layer to our evolving picture of the Local Bubble by charting the magnetic field of the structure, which is thought to play a major role in star formation. Astronomers led by Theo O'Neill, who conducted the new research during a summer research program at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), presented "the first-ever 3D map of a magnetic field over a superbubble" on Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society's 241st annual meeting in Seattle, Washington. The team also unveiled detailed visualizations of their new map, bringing the Local Bubble into sharper focus.
"We think that the entire interstellar medium is really full of all these bubbles that are driven by various forms of feedback from, especially, really massive stars, where they're outputting energy in some form or another into the space between the stars," said O'Neill, who just received an undergraduate degree in astronomy-physics and statistics from the University of Virginia, in a joint call with their mentor Alyssa Goodman, an astronomer at CfA who co-authored the new research. [...] "Now that we have this map, there's a lot of cool science that can be done both by us, but hopefully by other people as well," O'Neill said. "Since stars are clustered, it's not as if the Sun is super special, and is in the Local Bubble because we're just lucky. We know that the interstellar medium is full of bubbles like this, and there's actually a lot of them nearby our own Local Bubble." "One cool next step will be looking at places where the Local Bubble is nearby other feedback bubbles," they concluded. "What happens when these bubbles interact, and how does that drive start formation in general, and the overall long-term evolution of galactic structures?"
Now, a team of scientists has added another layer to our evolving picture of the Local Bubble by charting the magnetic field of the structure, which is thought to play a major role in star formation. Astronomers led by Theo O'Neill, who conducted the new research during a summer research program at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), presented "the first-ever 3D map of a magnetic field over a superbubble" on Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society's 241st annual meeting in Seattle, Washington. The team also unveiled detailed visualizations of their new map, bringing the Local Bubble into sharper focus.
"We think that the entire interstellar medium is really full of all these bubbles that are driven by various forms of feedback from, especially, really massive stars, where they're outputting energy in some form or another into the space between the stars," said O'Neill, who just received an undergraduate degree in astronomy-physics and statistics from the University of Virginia, in a joint call with their mentor Alyssa Goodman, an astronomer at CfA who co-authored the new research. [...] "Now that we have this map, there's a lot of cool science that can be done both by us, but hopefully by other people as well," O'Neill said. "Since stars are clustered, it's not as if the Sun is super special, and is in the Local Bubble because we're just lucky. We know that the interstellar medium is full of bubbles like this, and there's actually a lot of them nearby our own Local Bubble." "One cool next step will be looking at places where the Local Bubble is nearby other feedback bubbles," they concluded. "What happens when these bubbles interact, and how does that drive start formation in general, and the overall long-term evolution of galactic structures?"
Not the only bubble (Score:1, Troll)
Most of the human race also lives in a "reality exclusion bubble". Makes me wonder whether this installment of the human race was deliberately placed to make it hard getting out using ram-scoop based drives. Not that it looks like we will get to that level of tech before the now pretty much inevitable collapse in the next 100 years or so.
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There are really serious questions as to whether ram-scoop based drives are possible. The best guess is that they aren't. (Friction trumps fuel supply.) OTOH, a lot of things the people thought weren't possible turned out to be workable....but most of them didn't.
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There are really serious questions as to whether ram-scoop based drives are possible. The best guess is that they aren't.
You're probably correct. (a) Sheep don't live in the vacuum of Space (pretty sure) and (b) even if they did, there probably wouldn't be (aren't) enough of them to practically/efficiently scoop up for fuel. Also, (c) culling just the males would be difficult and it would dash the population.
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You know, people have been talking about the end of the world and the "inevitable collapse" of civilization for 2000+ years.
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Yes. But that were the people that now claim it will not happen. The current situation is reversed to all others that happened before.
My bubble isn't bigger than my Facebook friends (Score:3)
All three of them.
Charted?!? (Score:1)
Not so much, guessed and drew a imaginative map. According to the text.
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you misspelled sharted
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I'm just surprised that no other commenter here came to the same conclusion I did. Am I really just nitpicking words? or is the bar for science so low these days that nobody cares?
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i mean they could have atleast said using AI sharting technology...
Hitchhiker's Guide (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hitchhiker's Guide (Score:5, Funny)
Judging by how things turned out, it must've been a fart...
amazing visualizations (Score:5, Interesting)
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It's really surprising to me that our star (the Sun) is just about literally smack in the center of the thing. That's either:
1) Oddly lucky
2) suggestive of a data bias of some sort
3) Suggestive of an important clue that cosmologists should really look into
Re: (Score:2)
Not really. The Sun moves relative to the bubble, and entered it about 5 million years ago. In a few million years it'll exit through the other side. The bubble itself is a transient feature that's expanding from the supernovae that created it 10-20 million years ago. Presumably the Sun has flown through many similar bubbles in its past.
One thing that would be interesting to know is whether the Sun moving through a star-forming region (at the boundary between these bubbles) can affect the conditions on Eart
lack of bubble (Score:1)
Is it an actual 'thing', or is just the absence of 'things'? Pressure bubbles? Void bubbles? Are these things? Are they shrinking?
Re: (Score:2)
That depends on how you look at it. From within the bubble it's absence of stuff. At the edge it a collision with stuff moving in a different direction. (I.e. the stuff within the bubble is moving away from the site where the supernova happened yea many years ago, leaving a void behind it, but pressure when it hits the normal interstellar medium.) Then look at the finer details and things get complicated.
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While true, it doesn't lend very *much* weight, but the hypothesis is so improbable (by my priors) that even this tiny increment radically increases the probability. (Now it's up to perhaps one chance in 6,000,000 or so.)
Well, actually not, because I already knew that we lived in a bubble of that sort. This isn't the discovery, it's more the mapping of it. What I'm not clear about is how sharp the edges are. I have a strong suspicion that they are both extremely roiled, and not very sharp.
Sun (Score:2)
Seems like the Sun is pretty close to the center, that seems like a huge (almost unbelievable) coincidence.
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I don't recall our sun going nova. You really don't think it's odd we happen to be at the very center?
Re: Sun (Score:2)
Our star is not just some random star, it's the one with life floating around it.
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It's not odd if our star formed from the remnants of a supernova from the previous generation of stars. It also explains the relative abundance of heavier elements on Earth. Many of those elements form in the relatively short time in a star's life before it goes supernova (and some are thought to mostly form in the massive neutron flux during a supernova).
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But we just happen to be in the middle of it?
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Our star being close to the center makes perfect sense when you understand how star formation works.
This doesn't really make sense though, for multiple reasons. When a nova explodes, it pushes out the interstellar dust and gas in that zone out - hence the bubble. There wouldn't be enough material left after the nova explosion to create new stars in the middle of the bubble. The result is that new stars don't form in the same place as the old nova; they form at the edges of the bubble, where the gas pushed out from the nova meets the interstellar gas, creating zones of higher density, where new stars can c
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If you were looking at this five million years ago, the Sun would be right at the edge of the bubble. Would that also seem like a huge, almost unbelievable coincidence?
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
nothing with structure (Score:2)
Bubbles of nothing that have structure. I'm pretty sure physicists are really just stoners.
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Bubbles of nothing that have structure. I'm pretty sure physicists are really just stoners.
When they say we're "in" the universe but the universe has no edge, yes they are.
I Got A Question (Score:2)
Have physicists figured out what happens to all of us if that bubble bursts?
Or do they need another bucket of money from governments to fund that sort of investigation?
Be very thankful for this local bubble! (Score:2)
I think one of the chief factors that allowed our planet/system to evolve to where we're at today is being in this bubble, and hence insulated/protected from such events.
Sure, it'd be nice to be closer to other objects in space, like other stars and galaxies, but with that closeness also comes an elevated risk of being subject to the aforementioned eve
This could sovleve the Fermi Paradox (Score:2)