Ginormous ‘fossilised’ bubble near Milky Way could be relic of the Big Bang

A mysterious structure of galaxies in a giant bubble found not too far from the Milky Way could be a relic from the Big Bang, said researchers who stumbled upon the weird cluster in a study published in The Astrophysical Journal, earlier this month.

What is it?

The structure which consists of a group of galaxies clustered around a gigantic spherical void just 820 million light years from the Milky Way is believed to be a fossil-like remnant of the birth of the universe.

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The mysterious finding has been named Ho’oleilana, inspired by the Hawaiian creation chant evoking the origin of the structure, Kumulipo.

Researchers stumbled upon the structure which they believe is baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) and has been described as a fossilised acoustic wave frozen in time from the beginning of the cosmos and then stretched out to galactic scales by the universe’s expansion.

While researchers have previously found a number of such oscillations throughout the universe, it is the close proximity of this structure to our home galaxy that has left astronomers gobsmacked.

“We were not looking for it. It is so huge that it spills to the edges of the sector of the sky that we were analysing,” said Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, in a statement.

Tully also said that the finding could imply the universe is expanding more rapidly than we thought, adding that the “very large diameter of one billion light years is beyond theoretical expectations.”

How was it found?

The findings are based on a catalogue compiled by Tully and his colleagues called Cosmicflows-4 after measuring the distances to 55,877 galaxies in a specific sector of the sky, using eight distinct methodologies for the most accurate map yet.

It was after they mapped out the distance between galaxies that patterns and their density started to come together and the researchers discovered a ring which is 1 billion light-years wide, its circumference dotted with galaxies and connected to cosmic filaments.

While the structure’s interior was empty aside from a galaxy supercluster called the Bootes Supercluster in its centre.

“I am the cartographer of the group, and mapping Hoʻoleilana in three dimensions helps us understand its content and relationship with its surroundings,” said Daniel Pomarede, a cosmographer at CEA Paris-Saclay University in France.

He added, “It was an amazing process to construct this map and see how the giant shell structure of Hoʻoleilana is composed of elements that were identified in the past as being themselves some of the largest structures of the universe.”

Since Hoʻoleilana is bigger than most baryon acoustic oscillations, researchers believe that the universe may be expanding at a faster rate – at roughly 76.9 kilometres per second per megaparsec – than the standard range of 67 to 74.

How was it created?

In the well-established Big Bang theory, when the universe was very new, it was filled with a hot, dense plasma that behaved like a fluid. During this time, regions with slightly higher density began to collapse under gravity while the intense bath of radiation attempted to push matter apart.

It was this struggle between gravity and radiation which produced spherical acoustic waves that travelled through the plasma and when the universe eventually cooled the outward rippling of the acoustic waves stopped and became frozen as regions of higher density in the matter that was forming.

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