The gigantic bubble named Ho’oleilana is located 820 million light-years away from the Milky Way galaxy and may represent the “fossil” remnants of the universe’s birth event.
According to Sci-News, the “fossil” Ho’oleilana has a diameter of approximately 1 billion light-years and has been described by astronomer Cullan Howett from the University of Queensland (Australia) as overshadowing the largest known cosmic structures such as the “Great Wall” of Sloan and the Bootes Supercluster.
Ho’oleilana appears teasingly in the data from the Comicflows-4 and Sloan Digital Sky surveys.
The gigantic bubble Ho’oleilana, “fossil” of the dawn universe – (Graphic: Frédéric Durillon).
“We weren’t even looking for it. This structure is so large that it spills over the edge of the sky region we are analyzing,” Dr. Howett stated.
According to a paper recently published in the scientific journal Astrophysical Journal, in the theory of the Big Bang, during the first 400,000 years, the universe was a hot plasma vat—similar to the interiors of stars today. In this plasma, electrons were separated from atomic nuclei.
During this “chaotic” period, regions with slightly higher density began to collapse under the force of gravity, even as intense radiation was trying to push matter apart.
The struggle between gravity and this radiation caused the plasma to oscillate and ripple just like what we observe when a pebble is dropped into water.
In three-dimensional space, the ripples spread out in a spherical shape. From the central “pebble,” plasma ripples extended out to 500 million light-years around, then became fixed as the universe cooled and the plasma dissipated.
That is the “fossil sphere” that scientists have just observed.
However, this is not the only bubble in the universe. Over billions of years, such bubbles have formed sequentially, within which galaxies formed at maximum density.
The Milky Way Galaxy, where our planet resides, is also located within a similar bubble structure.
Therefore, studying the “ancient messenger” of the Big Bang—the oldest cosmic bubble ever found—could help cosmologists unravel the mysteries surrounding the formation and distribution of galaxies, as well as clarify the picture of the universe’s expansion.
