2023-09-08 22:06:00
A group of astronomers discovered the first “galaxy bubble”, an extraordinary structure about 10,000 times larger than our galaxy, whose origins date back to the origins of the universe almost 140,000 years ago, According to a study published in the Astrophysical Journal.
Located about 820 million light years from the Milky Wayin the “near universe” – as astronomers call it – this structure 1,000 million light years in diameter is like a “spherical shell with a heart,” he explained to the AFP French researcher Daniel Pomarède, astrophysicist and co-author of the study, published this week.
The heart of this “shell” is the Bouvier supercluster of galaxies, surrounded by a large void and enveloped by other superclusters and galactic filaments, such as the Sloan Great Wall.
Pomarède said that the discovery is part of “a very long scientific process”, since it validates a phenomenon already described in 1970 by the American cosmologist and future Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Jim Peebles.
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How the “galaxy bubble” formed
The scientist explains that in the primordial universe, then made up of a plasma of particles and light, the processes involved produce acoustic waves. These vibrations will create a kind of bubbles with matter in the center inside the plasma.
The process is interrupted 380,000 years after the Big Bang, “freezing” the shape of these bubbles. Then they will grow, according to the expansion of the universe, like the “fossils” of those eras.
The phenomenon, whose name was Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO), had indirect proof of its existence in 2005, from statistical analyzes of galaxy catalogues.
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The discovery of ‘Ho’oleilana’ “was something unexpected,” said the astrophysicist and co-author of the study
In 2014, Richard Brent Tully, an American scientist at the Honolulu Institute of Astronomy, discovered with Pomarède the galactic supercluster Laniakea – which means “immense sky” in Hawaiian – which contains about 100,000 galaxies, including our Milky Way.
Now, the discovery of Ho’oleilana – which means “murmurations of awakening” – occurred by chance, through Tully’s studies of the new galaxy catalogues.
“It was something unexpected”said Pomarède, who was studying a cartography of this region of the sky “which was a bit of a ‘terra incognita’ for us.”
The two researchers then contacted the young Australian cosmologist Cullan Howlett of the University of Brisbane. This third author of the study, an expert in BAO and in analysis of large galaxy catalogues, “mathematically determined the spherical structure that best corresponded to the data provided.”
This allowed us to visualize in three dimensions the shape of Ho’oleilana and the position of the galaxy archipelagos that compose it.
This information, the scientist noted, contributes to a key issue in cosmology: the value of the Hubble constant, which allows calculating the expansion levels of the universe, which sees how galaxies continue to move away from each other, and a bubble like Ho ‘oleilana continues to grow.
AG / Gi
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