According to a study published in the Astrophysical Journal, for the first time, astronomers have observed a “bubble of galaxies,” a massive mass that predates the early age of the universe, about 13.8 billion years ago.

Since it cannot be seen with the naked eye, the bubble is thought to be a mass about a billion light-years in diameter, ten thousand times larger than the Milky Way Galaxy.

French researcher Daniel Pomeret, an astrophysicist at the Atomic Energy Commission and co-author of the study published this week, told Agence France-Presse that the mass is in what astronomers call the nearby universe, about 820 million light-years away, in the Milky Way, which has “a center can be described as “spherical shell”.

The heart of this shell consists of the most massive galaxies surrounded by a great void, and surrounded by other massive galaxies and galactic filaments, such as the Sloan Great Wall.

Pommerit points out that the discovery of this “bubble of stars” represents “part of a much longer scientific process” because it confirms a phenomenon noted in 1970 by American cosmologist and Nobel laureate in physics Jim Peebles.

The scientist confirms that the processes taking place in the primitive universe consisting of a plasma of particles and light produce sound waves. These frequencies create bubbles within the plasma containing matter at their core.

This process stopped about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, leading to these bubbles forming a “frozen” shape. Then it grew as the universe expanded, like many “fossils” from early times.

In 2005, this phenomenon, called Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation (BAO), provided indirect evidence of its existence through statistical analysis of galactic data.

This was until a new bubble was discovered, named Holilana, a Native Hawaiian word meaning “whispers of warning.” The study’s lead author, American astrophysicist Richard Brent Tully of the Honolulu Astronomical Institute, gave the name to the newly discovered bubble.

He and Daniel Pomerady are credited with the 2014 discovery of the Laniakia Supercluster, which means “big sky” in the Native Hawaiian language, which alone contains about 100,000 galaxies, including the Milky Way.

Ho Olellana was discovered by chance as part of Richard Brent Tully’s work on new galaxy data. Pommerit says this was an “unexpected” discovery, and asked him to draw maps of this part of the sky, which he describes as an “unknown problem” for them.

The two researchers then contacted a young Australian cosmologist named Colin Howlett from the University of Brisbane. This third co-author of the study determined that “from a mathematical standpoint, the spherical structure best fits the data presented.”

All of this work made it possible to create a three-dimensional visualization of the shape of Ho Olellana and the location of the constellations that make it up.

He says that this research work contributes to an important topic in cosmology, the value of the Hubble constant, which allows us to calculate the expansion rate of the universe, whose galaxies are moving away from each other, and in which a bubble continues to blow “Ho Ollana”.

But the Hubble constant takes on different values ​​depending on whether it is measured in the near or far universe. In this case, Ho Ollana’s own research work confirms the first possibility.

The quest to find other blobs has begun with instruments like the European Euclid Space Telescope, launched in July, which will contribute to understanding the expansion of the universe, or the large radio telescope SKA Africa, which is being built in the south, to “observe the universe from the southern end of the Trail Galaxy.” Al-Tabbane”, according to Pommerit.

(AFP)