Many people enjoy talking about their neighborhood, and how well they've come to know it. But do you know much about the "neighborhood" that our Sun and its planets hang out in? New evidence from an instrument launched aboard a NASA rocket has confirmed that our cosmic neighborhood really is a big bubble.
We have known for some time that our solar system sits inside a region which is emptier than the typical neighborhood in the Milky Way Galaxy. This "Local Bubble" (as it is called) is about 300 light years across, meaning light would take 300 years to cross it. Our diagram shows the bubble and some of the bright stars that are located in it. (The stars that looked brightest to our ancestors are the ones that wound up getting names. Many of the names we use today are Arabic translations of ancient Greek names.)
The Sun is actually located in a region that has a bit more loose gas and dust that the bubble. We call our slightly denser region the "local fluff." You can see the local fluff and other slightly denser regions inside the big bubble in yellow on our picture.
But what made this bigger bubble that we sit inside? Our best idea was that the violent explosions of giant stars ("supernovae") carved out this emptier region perhaps 10 or 20 million years or so ago. Some astronomers were not convinced of the exploding-stars origin of our bubble and thought that we might be fooled by some ways that our Sun's wind (the flow of atomic particles boiling off our star's surface) is interacting with the material in the fluff.
A new instrument, which looked for x-rays that come from collisions of atoms in deep space, was launched in 2012 aboard a rocket and got to spend five minutes above the Earth's atmosphere, where cosmic x-rays can be monitored. The data collected from those five minutes (!) was enough for the astronomers to confirm that the violence of exploding stars was the major contributor to the signs of the local bubble.
The exploding stars were not close enough to the Sun and the Earth to hurt life on our planet significantly -- after all, life on Earth thrived earlier than 10 million years ago and still thrives today. But it's clearer and clearer to astronomers that exploding stars have a lot to do with the geography and chemical makeup of our Galaxy. They not only made the bubble we find ourselves in, but we also know that it is the death of these stars that recycles the elements they get to make in their hot centers. This enriches the neighborhood with atoms like carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen -- the chemical building blocks of life as we know it. (Just about every atom of calcium in your bones, for example, was actually once inside a star that later exploded.)
By the way, our cosmic bubble is by no means unique. Other bubbles have been discovered near and far, blown by countless other star explosions over the 13 billion-year history of the Milky Way Galaxy.
For more technical details about this research, see the nice Science@NASA newsletter at: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/26aug_localbubble/
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