Astronomers make 1st-ever 3D map of the gigantic bubble that surrounds the Earth and the Sun
Without most of humanity being aware of it, our planet (together with the Sun and the rest of the Solar System) is inside a gigantic bubble, a ‘hole’ that surrounds the Earth on all sides. Known as the ‘Local Bubble’, this incredible structure, about 1,000 light-years across, is a hollow mass of diffused hot plasma, trapped inside a layer of cold gas and dust and on whose surface new stars are continually being born.
The super bubble is just one of many similar ones discovered elsewhere in our galaxy, giving the Milky Way the appearance of a real space Swiss cheese, riddled with holes everywhere. Now, as the culmination of long years of effort, an international team of astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has just produced the first 3D map of the bubble that surrounds us.
