13 billion year old 'fossil' of Big Bang discovered

The giant bubble, named Ho'oleilana, whose center lies 820 million light-years away from the Milky Way, may be a "fossilized" remnant of the birth of the universe.

According to Sci-News , the Ho'oleilana "fossil" mass is about 1 billion light-years in diameter, described by astronomer Cullan Howett from the University of Queensland (Australia) as dwarfing the largest known cosmic structures such as the Sloan "Great Wall" and the Bootes supercluster .

Ho'oleilana appears tantalizingly in data from Comicflows-4 and Sloan Digital Sky surveys.

The giant bubble Ho'oleilana, a "fossil" of the dawn universe - (Graphic image: Frédéric Durillon).

"We weren't even looking for it. This structure was so big that it stretched out to the edge of the sky we were analyzing ," said Dr Howett.

According to a paper recently published in the Astrophysical Journal , in the Big Bang theory, for the first 400,000 years, the universe was a hot plasma - like the inside of stars today. In the plasma, electrons were separated from the nucleus of atoms.

During this "chaotic" period , regions of slightly higher density began to collapse under the force of gravity, even as intense radiation tried to push matter apart.

This struggle between gravity and radiation causes the plasma to vibrate and ripple just like what we see when a pebble is dropped into water.

In three-dimensional space, the ripples spread out in a spherical shape. From the central 'pebble,' the plasma ripples spread out for 500 million light-years, then became fixed as the universe cooled and no longer had plasma.

That is the "fossil" ball that scientists have just seen.

But that's not the only bubble in the universe. Over billions of years, bubbles like this were born one after another, and within them, galaxies were formed at their maximum density.

The Milky Way galaxy in which our planet resides is also located in a similar bubble structure.

Therefore, studying the "ancient messenger" of the Big Bang, the oldest cosmic bubble ever found, can help space scientists explain the mysteries surrounding the formation and distribution of galaxies, as well as clarify the picture of the expansion of the universe.