{"id":155492,"date":"2023-01-14T14:23:34","date_gmt":"2023-01-14T20:23:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/we-live-inside-a-1000-light-year-wide-bubble-whose-magnetism-has-been-mapped"},"modified":"2023-01-14T14:23:34","modified_gmt":"2023-01-14T20:23:34","slug":"we-live-inside-a-1000-light-year-wide-bubble-whose-magnetism-has-been-mapped","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/we-live-inside-a-1000-light-year-wide-bubble-whose-magnetism-has-been-mapped","title":{"rendered":"We Live Inside A 1,000-Light-Year-Wide Bubble Whose Magnetism Has Been Mapped"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/FqgIrUuEymQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>If anyone accuses you of \u201cliving in a bubble\u201d there is an astronomically correct, if not always convincing, response: we all do. The Sun sits inside what is known as the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.iflscience.com\/baby-stars-near-us-are-all-born-from-a-1000light-year-bubble-62219\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Local Bubble<\/a>, a space within the Milky Way galaxy some 1,000 light-years across in which interstellar material is scarce. It can be hard to map something from the inside, but that\u2019s what astronomers have tried to do with the Local Bubble\u2019s magnetic fields.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s easy to imagine that anything distinctive about our Solar System\u2019s location must be connected to our apparent uniqueness. However, superbubbles like our own are not particularly rare; indeed, the galaxy has enough of them to prompt comparisons with Swiss cheese. They are left behind by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.iflscience.com\/tags\/supernova\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">supernova<\/a> explosions that push gas and dust out of surrounding regions. The material swept out by the explosion concentrates on the bubble\u2019s surface \u2013 still so thin it would be considered a vacuum by Earthly standards, but dense enough to trigger star formation.<\/p>\n<p>Nevertheless, our knowledge of superbubbles in general and the Local Bubble, in particular, is almost as thin as the material inside. The magnetic mapping of the Local Bubble, presented at the <a href=\"https:\/\/aas.org\/meetings\/aas241\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">American Astronomical Society\u2019s 241<sup>st<\/sup> meeting<\/a>, is an attempt to address that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If anyone accuses you of \u201cliving in a bubble\u201d there is an astronomically correct, if not always convincing, response: we all do. The Sun sits inside what is known as the Local Bubble, a space within the Milky Way galaxy some 1,000 light-years across in which interstellar material is scarce. It can be hard to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":511,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,1965],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-mapping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}