2023-09-23 14:49:47
– Discovery of a colossal galaxy bubble
It has a diameter of a billion light years and mainly contains traces of the primordial Universe.
Published today at 4:49 p.m.
In 2014, we spotted Laniakea (here is an artist’s impression), a gigantic structure including our Milky Way. We discovered even bigger recently.
ADOBE IMAGEREADY
Let us remember Laniakea. A singing name of Hawaiian origin which means, with a few nuances, “immeasurable paradise”. It actually designates a supercluster of galaxies including the Virgo supercluster, of which the Milky Way is a part, therefore the solar system, the sun and then the Earth. The size of this celestial object defies belief since it is around 520 million light years away.
Let’s continue in poetry for a moment to recall that Laniakea also contains the Peacock-Indian supercluster, as well as that of the Hydra-Centaur, in which there is this gravitational anomaly which bears the name of Great Attractor because its mass has an effect on the movement of the galaxies, which seem to be heading towards him. The Laniakea observation dates back to 2014. Have we done better since then? Yes, and it’s dizzying.
And it wasn’t even that long ago, at the very beginning of this month. A group of international astronomers led by the University of Hawaii ( once more) have indeed mapped the nearby Universe and detected a compression wave which would have formed in the original plasma. This wave would have led to the formation of a sort of bubble containing matter at its center. Are there several? Probably.
The creation of the world
One of them has in any case been identified as an immense gathering of galaxies. Which forms a bubble a billion light years in diameter, as we learn from a publication in “The Astrophysical Journal”. This observation completes the global map of the universe, alongside, precisely, Laniakea. This bubble also has an exotic, practically unpronounceable name: Hoʻoleilana. Term which means “song of the creation of the world” and takes its source from the “Kumulipo”, an 18th century Hawaiian religious song recounting the creation of the world.
Because yes, given the colossal size of this structure and its age – its genesis dates back to the early times of the universe, almost 13.8 billion years ago – it would carry within it the traces of the distant past of the ‘universe. Clearly, we would approach quite close to the Big Bang, if indeed it really took place. And that would be revolutionary.
Daniel Pomarède, astrophysicist, cartographer and discoverer in particular of Laniakea, put forward a first hypothesis in the columns of the monthly “Sciences and Future”: “We think that this superstructure is not there by chance. It would testify to the existence of what we call “acoustic baryonic oscillations” (OBA), a phenomenon which agitated the Universe when it was less than 380,000 years old. Thus, through this bubble, we perhaps contemplate a “fossil” of the primordial Universe.”
Close to our Milky Way
Its discovery in any case validates this phenomenon of OBAs highlighted by Jim Peebles, cosmologist who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1970. As for the number of 380,000 years following the Big Bang, since it is of this order of magnitude that This may seem like a lot, but it’s actually extremely early following the creation of the universe.
Even if geometric approaches are difficult in an expanding universe where matter twists the space around it, the shape of this bubble of galaxies can be compared to a spherical shell containing a heart. It is “relatively” close to our Milky Way, approximately 820 million light years away.
At the center of Hoʻoleilana, we find some old knowledge such as the Bouvier supercluster or the great wall of Sloan, which is made up of galactic filaments. All that’s missing is the gods of Greek mythology to come and play in the middle of all these formations. Thanks to the Euclid space telescope, which was launched on July 1 by the European Space Agency, and soon to the Square Kilometer Array, or SKA, a giant radio telescope project which should be deployed in 2027 or 2028 in South Africa and then in Australia, we hope to discover other bubbles and better understand the expansion of the Universe. In any case, we are getting closer and closer to it.
Pascal Gavillet has been a journalist in the cultural section since 1992. He mainly deals with cinema, but he also writes on other areas. Especially science. As such, he is also a mathematician.More information@PascalGavillet
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