Earth is surrounded by a vast bubble about 1,000 light-years wide whose borders drive the formation of all nearby young stars, a new study finds.
lies within the so-called"Local Bubble," a giant void surrounded by thousands of young stars. However, much has remained unclear about this bubble — everything from its precise size and shape to its origins and evolution has remained unknown.
"The research involved mapping three dimensions of space, three dimensions of motion and a time dimension. Now we can literally 'turn back the clock' and see how these star-forming regions evolved over the past millennia." In contrast,"most of our traditional understanding of stellar birth has been based on static 2-D images of star-forming regions," Zucker added.
"The supernova explosions triggered a shock wave, and this expanding shockwave subsequently swept up a shell of dense, cool gas — that is, the surface of the Local Bubble — which has now collapsed to form thousands of new stars," Zucker said. Today, seven well-known molecular clouds — dense regions in space where pockets of gas may collapse to form stars — sit on the bubble's surface.
The new findings suggest that a supernova linked with the bubble has detonated about every million years since the first one exploded about 14 million years ago.
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