The giant cosmic bubble has been named “Ho’oleilana,” located approximately 820 million light-years away from the Milky Way galaxy, possibly representing the “fossil” remnants of the universe’s birth event.
According to Sci-News, the “fossil” mass of Ho’oleilana has a diameter of about 1 billion light-years, described by astronomer Cullan Howett from the University of Queensland (Australia) as surpassing even the largest known cosmic structures like the “Sloan Great Wall” and the supercluster Bootes.
Ho’oleilana has emerged playfully in the data from the Comicflows-4 and Sloan Digital Sky surveys.
The giant bubble Ho’oleilana, the “fossil” of the universe’s dawn – Graphic: Frédéric Durillon
“We weren’t even looking for it. It’s so big that it spills over the edge of the sky region we were analyzing,” said Dr. Howett.
As per the recently published paper in the Astrophysical Journal, in the Big Bang theory, during the first 400,000 years, the universe was a hot plasma soup, similar to the interiors of stars today. In this plasma, electrons were separated from atomic nuclei.
During this “chaotic” period, slightly denser regions began to contract under the influence of gravity, even as intense radiation tried to push matter apart. The struggle between gravity and radiation caused the plasma to oscillate and ripple, much like what we see when a pebble falls into a body of water.
In three-dimensional space, the ripples spread out in a spherical pattern. From the central “pebble,” plasma ripples radiated outwards for up to 500 million light-years before freezing as the universe cooled and the plasma disappeared. This is the fossilized bubble that scientists have just observed.
However, this is not the only bubble in the universe. Over billions of years, such bubbles formed one after the other, and inside them, galaxies formed at their highest density.
Our Milky Way galaxy, where our planet resides, is also within a similar bubble structure.
Therefore, studying this “ancient messenger” of the Big Bang, the longest-lived cosmic bubble ever found, may help cosmologists explain the mysteries surrounding the formation and distribution of galaxies, as well as shed light on the broader picture of the universe’s expansion.