Think “bubbles,” and you may think “soap” or “gum.”
But not Catherine Zucker, currently a Hubble Fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a former researcher with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Zucker’s interest in bubbles is cosmic. And she and her collaborators have found new insights about a bubble in which our solar system sits.
Astronomers have long known about the 1,000-light-year-wide Local Bubble. In a new paper published Jan. 12 in Nature, Zucker and her co-authors describe it as “a cavity of low-density, high-temperature plasma surrounded by a shell of cold, neutral gas and dust.” But for years, astronomers were in the dark beyond that. The history of the Local Bubble, even its size, remained unknown.
Bubbly beginnings
What Zucker’s team found, according to their paper, was “that nearly all of the star-forming complexes in the solar vicinity lie on the surface of the Local Bubble and that their young stars show outward expansion mainly perpendicular to the bubble’s surface.” She calls it a “eureka moment.”
In other words, the young stars in our galactic neighborhood are almost all due to the expansive shock waves of a series of supernovae and that process of blown-out remains recombining to birth new suns and new solar systems. The bubble - which is actually shaped more like a piece of pipe cutting through the plane of the Milky Way – seems to have formed 14 million years ago from some 15 supernovae, and the triggered star formation that is still happening today.
Zucker presented her team’s work virtually this week at a drastically scaled-back gathering of the American Astronomical Society, which was to have met in-person in Salt Lake City. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic upended those plans.
It just happens that the Sun and our solar system currently sit inside this bubble. According to the team, the Sun rolled into the Local Bubble about 5 million years ago — but it likely sat in other bubbles at other times.
“This work is most useful for providing the ‘big picture’ context for star and planet formation,” Zucker says. “One takeaway that might have been missed is that this study is really the tip of the iceberg. The Local Bubble is just the first bubble whose history we have mapped out — it's the easiest one to understand first, since it's the bubble in which our Sun currently resides. However, we have clues that not just single superbubbles, but the interactions of many superbubbles, are driving the formation of young stars near our Sun.”
Zucker compares the process to plowing snow. If one or more superbubbles is “piling up gas in the same region of space … we should get even more enhanced star formation at those intersecting surfaces.” And, in fact, one such bubble, called Perseus-Taurus, is interacting with our Local Bubble “at the site of the Taurus molecular cloud” — home to known protoplanetary disks.
Interested readers can also find cool data visualizations and more information at the team’s dedicated website.