West News Wire: The first “bubble of galaxies” has been found by a group of worldwide astronomers. It is an unfathomably large cosmic structure that is one billion light-years across and is assumed to be a fossilised remnant from immediately after the Big Bang.
Scientists who made the discovery and released their results this week claim that the bubble is 10,000 times larger than the Milky Way galaxy.
According to team member Cullan Howlett from The University of Queensland’s School of Mathematics and Physics, “this phenomenal bubble is a fossil from the time of the Big Bang 13 billion years ago when the universe was formed.”
“We weren’t even looking for it, but the structure is so huge it spilled to the edges of the sector of the sky we were analysing,” Howlett said in an interview published by the University of Queensland.
“It dwarfs many of the largest known structures, such as the Sloan Great Wall and Bootes supercluster, which actually form part of this bubble,” he said.
“What makes it even more unbelievable is it’s right in our back yard,” he added.
The bubble is located in the region of the cosmos known as the local universe, around 820 million light-years from our own galaxy.
Howlett claimed that the result might completely alter cosmology and that it gives a clearer picture of the speed at which the universe is expanding.
“Our analysis suggests that because this bubble is larger than expected, the universe has expanded further than originally predicted,” he said.
“In the field of cosmology, we’re now one step closer to a major shift, where the entire universe model may need to be re-examined.”
An astronomer at France’s Atomic Energy Commission and teammate Daniel Pomarede described the bubble of galaxies as “a spherical shell with a heart.”
Inside that heart is the Bootes supercluster of galaxies, which is surrounded by a vast void sometimes called “the Great Nothing”.
The shell contains several other galaxy superclusters already known to science, including the massive structure known as the Sloan Great Wall.
