JAKARTA – The bubble is 10,000 times wider than the Milky Way galaxy and is located 820 million light years from our galaxy.
An international team of astronomers has discovered the first “galactic bubble,” a massive cosmic structure measuring a billion light years across and thought to be a fossilized remnant of the aftermath of the Big Bang.
The bubble is 10,000 times wider than the Milky Way galaxy, according to the scientists who made the discovery and published their findings this week.
“These phenomenal bubbles are fossils from the Big Bang 13 billion years ago when the universe was formed,” said team member Cullan Howlett, from the University of Queensland’s School of Mathematics and Physics, in a commentary published on Thursday (7/9/2023).
“We weren’t even looking for it, but the structure was so large that it spread to the edge of the sky sector we analyzed,” Howlett said in an interview published by the University of Queensland.
“This dwarfs many of the largest known structures, such as the Sloan Great Wall and Bootes superclusters, which are actually part of this bubble,” he said.
“What makes it even more unbelievable is that it’s right in our backyard,” he added.
The bubble is centered about 820 million light years from our galaxy, which astronomers call the nearest universe.
Howlett said the discovery provides a clearer picture of the expansion rate of the universe, and it could revolutionize cosmology.
“Our analysis shows that because this bubble is larger than expected, the universe has expanded further than previously thought,” he said.
“We are now one step closer to major changes in cosmology, which may require a re-evaluation of entire models of the universe.”
Nothing Great
Fellow team member Daniel Pomarede, an astrophysicist at the French Atomic Energy Commission, said the galaxy bubble could be thought of as a “spherical shell with a heart”.
At its heart is the Bootes supercluster of galaxies, surrounded by a vast void sometimes called the “Great Nothing.”
Its shell contains several other galaxy superclusters already known to science, including the massive structure known as the Sloan Great Wall.
Pomarede said the discovery of the bubbles, described in research he co-authored published in The Astrophysical Journal this week, was “part of a very long scientific process.”
The discovery also confirms a phenomenon first described in 1970 by Canadian-American cosmologist – and future Nobel Prize winner in physics – Jim Peebles.
He theorized that in the primordial universe – which was then a hot plasma – the rotation of gravity and radiation created sound waves called baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO).
As sound waves ripple through the plasma, they create bubbles.
About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the process stopped when the universe cooled, freezing the bubble into shape.
The bubbles then expanded as the universe expanded, similar to other fossil remains after the Big Bang.
Astronomers previously detected BAO signals in 2005 when looking at data from nearby galaxies. But the newly discovered bubbles represent the first known single baryon acoustic oscillations, according to the researchers.
Astronomers called their bubble Ho`oleilana – meaning “sending the murmur of awakening” – taking the name from the Hawaiian creation song.
The name comes from the study’s lead author, Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii.
2023-09-09 14:30:00
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