Strange Bubble Of Nothingness In Space
In between the molecular clouds Perseus and Taurus hides a nothingness. This bubble with a diameter of 500 light-years was probably created by a supernova explosion.
Image by WikiImages from Pixabay
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It may not seem like it but space isn’t exactly empty. Especially inside of galaxies. When you forget our minuscule Solar system there are stars, gas, and dust clouds everywhere. But this is not the case everywhere. There are some fascinating exceptions.
Shmuel Bialy from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and his team discovered one of these exceptions at a distance of roughly 700 light-years from Earth. Between the Perseus and Taurus constellations, you can find a large ball-shaped emptiness with a diameter of roughly 500 light-years. Near it, dense molecular clouds Perseus (Per MCld) and Taurus (TMC) where new stars are being born.
The strange emptiness was named Per-Tau Shell. At this time, we aren’t completely sure how it got created. But its discoverers think that about 10 (22 to 6) millions of years ago it was created by gigantic shockwaves coming from a supernova or perhaps a series of supernovae. If they are correct it most likely means that the molecular clouds Perseus and Taurus aren’t independent structures. They could have been created by the supernova (or supernovae) explosion.
If you’d like there is even an interactive model of Per Tau Shel available HERE
Mapping 3D structures in space isn’t easy. Especially when it comes to nothingness. Bialy and his colleagues used data coming from the European observatory Gaia and this data also allows us to know the shape and size of not only the void-ball but also the molecular clouds in its vicinity.
Experts have been theorizing and modeling how exactly do molecular clouds start to produce new stars for quite some time now. The Per-Tau Shell void allows them to see this in “real-time” for the first time ever.
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I had read somewhere that such pockets of emptiness might be evidence of another universe touching ours and forming a structure the way two soap bubbles do when in contact.