Astronomers discover the first bubble of galaxies, a huge cosmic structure from just after the Big Bang
The bubble spans a billion light years, making it 10,000 times wider than the Milky Way galaxy
The bubble is located in the nearby universe, only 820 million light years away from our galaxy
The bubble is a spherical shell with a heart, containing several galaxy superclusters, including the Sloan Great Wall.
The heart of the bubble is the Bootes supercluster of galaxies, surrounded by a vast void called "the Great Nothing
The bubble was created by sound waves called baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs) in the primordial universe, which rippled through the hot plasma and formed bubbles.
The bubble is a fossilised remnant of the early universe, frozen in shape as the universe cooled down and expanded.
The bubble is named Ho’oleilana, meaning “sent murmurs of awakening” in Hawaiian, inspired by a creation chant
The bubble was discovered by chance by astronomer Brent Tully and his colleagues, who were searching through new catalogues of galaxies
The discovery confirms a phenomenon first described by US cosmologist and Nobel laureate Jim Peebles in 1970
The discovery is described in a research paper published in The Astrophysical Journal this week.
The discovery is “part of a very long scientific process”, according to astrophysicist Daniel Pomarede, one of the co-authors of the paper.
The discovery was made possible by mathematical modelling by Australian cosmologist and BAO expert Cullan Howlett, who visualised the three-dimensional shape of the bubble and its contents.
The discovery is “something unexpected”, according to Pomarede, who said the bubble is "so huge that it spills to the edges of the sector of the sky that we were analysing
The discovery could lead to more bubbles being spotted across the universe, with the help of new telescopes such as Euclid and Square Kilometre Array.