Violent explosion rips through giant cavity in space, spawning new stars

There is a monstrous hole in the universe. Long ago, a star exploded with extreme force and erased everything in its path. It even swept up tiny particles of space dust – but in a surprising turn of events, that space dust accumulated, collapsed, and eventually gave birth to a bunch of baby stars.

As the saying goes, it is the circle of life.

“This is something that has been suggested in theory, and also seen in numerical simulations, but now we think we are seeing it for the first time in observations,” said lead author Shmuel Bialy, astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Institute for Theory and Computing.

The story begins with a spherical vacuum that is millions of years and 500 light years old lurking in space. To be clear, this completely empty cavity is absolutely huge. One light year equals approximately 6,000 billion miles (9,000 billion kilometers), which means that the void could contain 150,000 versions of our solar system.

Mysterious and seemingly sheer cavities like this are sometimes detected in the cosmos. They are just sudden holes of empty space. But because astronomers typically study two-dimensional space – with spectral data or even photographs – three-dimensional structures can be difficult to find. Even when astronomers locate them, it can be quite difficult to figure out what is going on.

“There is a lot of confusion along the line of sight,” Bialy said. “You don’t know the distance, so sometimes we see different structures and they look like one structure – or the other way around.”

Bialy’s team solved the problem by harnessing a new power: augmented reality.

They recreated a mini-version of the gigantic space cavity, along with the elements that surround it. Then they played with their model in real time to unlock the secrets of the elusive void. A QR code of the masterpiece is included in their article, published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. There is also a demo on YouTube.

Basically you can download their reconstructed piece of space to your phone and feel like it’s in your bedroom. “It’s almost like the movies where you have a hologram,” Bialy said.

Examining their digital sculpture for research purposes – as opposed to the frivolous pleasure I had spinning the projection on my coffee table – the team saw an unusual “shell” of material around a symmetrical, abandoned area. : the giant cavity.

They concluded that an almost 10 million-year-old star explosion – or several star explosions during the period – pushed the particles nearby, creating a space dust capsule encircling an uninhabited region. from space.

“Imagine… you have a lot of dust on the ground,” Bialy explained. “You have a big room and you’re just sweeping some of the dust out of an area – now in that area… you have a much higher dust density.”

When space dust clumps together, it collapses and compacts more easily. But perhaps the most surprising discovery is that two famous clouds, Perseus and Taurus, which rise from baby stars like a star factory, live in this dust shell.

“It was traditionally thought that they were just two independent clouds,” Bialy said. “Now, with this three-dimensional view and the discovery of this cavity, we understand that they likely formed together through the action of a supernova explosion that preceded them.”

This means that the star explosions could set off a chain reaction that will ultimately lead to the creation of their own descendants.

“I wouldn’t say it’s the only way to form clouds that form stars, but it’s a viable way,” Bialy said.

Bialy’s entire project initially began as an examination of Perseus’ single molecular cloud. Researchers were trying to understand star formation and gaps in the small region of 2D space. Looking at the pictures, they started to notice little “shells” in Perseus.

So they started to zoom in… then again… and again.

“We enlarged the map,” Bialy explained. “We started to see seashells getting bigger and bigger until, finally, this huge seashell.”

In addition to encouraging the audience to see the magic for themselves, by scanning the QR code and exploring the model, Bialy says, the team also made all of their digital data public. This ensures transparency so that anyone can attempt to draw the same conclusions the team came to, but from scratch, if they so choose.

Beyond the remarkable discoveries about how stars and star clouds might be produced, Bialy points out that the use of new perspectives and methodologies in astrophysics could pave the way for the subject’s future.

“I was just doing science,” Bialy said. “So I work with this augmented reality company and a host and different people.”

AR, in particular, promises a much richer library of scientific literature. Instead of a thick set of encyclopedias, we would turn to digital holograms that can be viewed at will.