Hoʻoleilana, a Billion-Light-Year-Wide Bubble of Galaxies, Astounds Astronomers

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September 28, 2023

This week, we're looking at the big picture. A picture so big, in fact, that its hazy outlines sprawl across a billion light-years. Our top story concerns an immense structure astronomers have glimpsed among the myriad galaxies surrounding our own—a vast galactic shell dubbed "Ho'oleilana" that might be a fossil relic of the primordial universe, formed from a sort of frozen soundwave (technically speaking, a baryon acoustic oscillation) shortly after the big bang. Studying Ho'oleilana, its discoverers hope, could help clarify the still-murky conditions that prevailed in the first moments of cosmic time. Elsewhere this week, we have stories on the OSIRIS-REx mission's successful asteroid sample return, a breakthrough measurement of antimatter, supermassive black hole feeding frenzies, drip-brewed coffee's quantum underpinnings, and much more. Enjoy!

Lee Billings, Senior Editor, Space & Physics

Cosmology Hoʻoleilana, a Billion-Light-Year-Wide Bubble of Galaxies, Astounds Astronomers This enormous structure could help explain processes close to the dawn of time—or it could be a random cosmic fluke By Adam Mann

Planetary Science OSIRIS-REx's Asteroid Samples Are Finally Down to Earth OSIRIS-REx—the first U.S. mission to attempt a sample return from a space rock—has successfully sent materials from asteroid Bennu back to Earth By Leonard David

Consciousness Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe? Physicists and philosophers recently met to debate a theory of consciousness called panpsychism By Dan Falk

Particle Physics What Happens if You Drop Antimatter? New Gravitational Test Sees First Fall In theory, physicists knew that antimatter should behave just like matter under gravity's pull. But until now, no one had ever seen it happen By Stephanie Pappas

Planetary Science Jupiter's Moon Europa May Hide Tantalizing Carbon in Mysterious Ocean Jupiter's mysterious moon Europa may hold carbon in the ocean lurking beneath its icy shell By Meghan Bartels

Astronomy NASA's Gorgeous New Moon Image Paints Shackleton Crater in Light and Shadow A new NASA instrument allows researchers to view the bright and permanently shadowed portions of the moon's Shackleton Crater at the same time By Stephanie Pappas

Black Holes Supermassive Black Hole Feeding Frenzies May Explain Blinking Quasars A new simulation shows black holes ripping apart and consuming their accretion disk in a matter of months, which may explain why some quasars quickly brighten and dim By Stephanie Pappas

Geology Dead Trees and a Mysterious Cosmic Explosion Reveal Bigger Quake Risk for Seattle Washington State's Puget Sound could face previously unknown earthquake risks, according to a new study that has pinned down the date of an ancient earthquake using tree rings and the radiation left by a mysterious cosmic force By Robin George Andrews

Astrophysics Song of the Stars, Part 1: Transforming Space into Symphonies Space is famously silent, but astronomers and musicians are increasingly turning astronomical data into sound as a way to make discoveries and inspire people who are blind or visually impaired. By Timmy Broderick,Jason Drakeford,Carin Leong | 10:32

Astrophysics Song of the Stars, Part 2: Seeing in the Dark In 2014, a blind astronomer "sonified" the universe's most explosive event: a gamma-ray burst. By listening to, rather than looking at, the data, she made a critical discovery and changed the field of astronomy. By Timmy Broderick,Jason Drakeford,Carin Leong | 10:25

Climate Change Pangaea Ultima, the Next Supercontinent, May Doom Mammals to Far-Future Extinction 250 million years from now, the emergence of a new supercontinent could render most of Earth's surface uninhabitable for mammals By Jonathan O'Callaghan,Nature magazine

Climate Change Our Fragile Earth: How Close Are We to Climate Catastrophe? Lessons from past eras when Earth was a hothouse or a snowball tell us whether we are doomed by climate change or still have time to prevent that fate By Mark Fischetti

Mathematics How Mathematical Objects Are like People and Other Mysteries of Intersection Theory A Q&A with Hannah Larson, a recipient of the 2024 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize By Rachel Crowell

Quantum Physics Bizarre Quantum Theory Explains Why Your Coffee Takes So Long to Drip through a Narrow Filter Physicist John Cardy and his colleague just won the 2024 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. We spoke with Cardy about conformal field theory, 2D black holes and coffee filters By Stephanie Pappas

Quantum Computing What's a Qubit? 3 Ways Scientists Build Quantum Computers Scientists are trying to master the basic computing element known as a qubit to make quantum computers more powerful than electronic machines By Katherine Wright

Quantum Physics To Move Fast, Quantum Maze Solvers Must Forget the Past Quantum algorithms can find their way out of mazes exponentially faster than classical ones, at the cost of forgetting the paths they took By Ben Brubaker,Quanta Magazine

Astronomy The Loss of Dark Skies Is So Painful, Astronomers Coined a New Term for It Astronomers have a new term to describe the pain associated with the loss of access to dark skies: noctalgia By Paul Sutter,SPACE.com

Astronomy The Equinox Is Not What You Think It Is The equinox is not when day and night have equal lengths. Instead it's something more nuanced but no less glorious By Phil Plait

Black Holes JWST Finds Strange Harmony in Early Galaxies and Black Holes Black holes in the extraordinarily distant cosmos are out of tune with their host galaxies, offering insights into their formation By Fabio Pacucci

QUOTE OF THE DAY "It's a treasure trove from the very beginning of our solar system. We know Bennu is rich in carbon, it's rich in water. That may hold clues as to why Earth is a habitable world and how did we get here." Dante Lauretta, principal investigator of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, which last week delivered samples of the asteroid Bennu back to Earth

FROM THE ARCHIVE World's Largest Map of Space Offers Clues on Dark Energy A new chart of millions of galaxies across 11 billion years of cosmic history helps to answer some of the biggest cosmological questions By Kyle Dawson,Will Percival | May 2021

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