I had to giggle at the image – the colors they used: red and blue. Red pill or blue pill.
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The bubble-shaped void is likely the result of an ancient supernova shockwave.
Two clouds of gas, both alike in dignity, appear side by side in the fair Milky Way. Known as “molecular clusters,” these enormous provinces of star-forming gas stretch across the sky, seeming to form a bridge between the Taurus and Perseus constellations where new suns can grow and thrive for billions of years to come.
It’s a celestial tale of star-crossed love — and, according to new research, it’s also an enormous optical illusion.
New 3D maps of the region, created with help from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory, show that these canoodling clouds are actually hundreds of light-years apart — separated by an enormous, empty orb where neither gas, nor dust nor stars can find purchase.
Dubbed the Perseus-Taurus Supershell, this newly detected chasm stretches about 500 light-years wide, according to a study published Sept. 22 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters — or roughly 115 times the distance between Earth and the nearest alien sun, Proxima Centauri. While hundreds of young stars have already formed around the edges of the bubble, the great, spherical emptiness within points to one obvious culprit, the authors wrote: a catastrophic supernova explosion.
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