A group of astronomers has discovered a giant cavity in the Milky Way, surrounded by two nebulae, Perseus and Taurus.that arose after at least one star exploded.
According to a study published on Wednesday, the molecular clouds of Perseus and Taurus, as they are scientifically known, have been examined by astronomers for a long time, primarily because they are relatively close to Earth, at a distance of between 500 and 1000 light-years.
But these two nebulae also have another benefit: They are arrays of stars, formed thanks to the mixture of molecular gas and galactic dust. For a long time, astronomers believed that Perseus and Taurus were connected by some kind of thread. A note later ignored.
“The funny thing is that we found out that they are connected, but not in the way we imagine, But for a giant cavityShmuel Bialy, a researcher at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, explained.
With the help of the European Gaia Space Telescope and tools for computation and 3D image generation, the scientists were able to create a map of the cavity called Per-Tau.
You have to imagine Per-Tau as a “sort of a ball with an empty inside,” Biale explained as a “super bubble” with a diameter equivalent to the previously mentioned distance between Earth and the “arrays” of nebulae: about 500 light years. Its outer shell will be formed in part by Perseus and Taurus.
Inside there is little stellar dust “but a very weak density compared to that in the surrounding clouds,” cosmologist and astrophysicist Torsten Enslin, associate professor at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, told AFP.
Ensslin co-authored the study on Per-Tau, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, deceive Bialy.
Hypothesis on the origin of the mystery Perseus and the bull
In turn, astrophysicist and postdoctoral researcher Catherine Zucker signed another study that revealed how, for the first time, scientists were able to recreate real, not simulated, 3D views, allowing theories to be tested through direct observation.
“We think (Per Tau) is caused by a supernova, a huge explosion that released those gases and formed those clouds,” Bialy said. It even calls for multiple supernovae to explode.
When it exploded, one or more dying stars released and pushed out the gases they bathed in, and those gases formed that cavity between 6 and 22 million years ago.
