Scientists unravel mystery of giant cosmic bubble surrounding Earth - CNET

The bubble is 1,000 light-years wide and the source of all our star friends.

An artist's illustration of the Local Bubble with star formation occurring on the bubble's surface.

"This is really an origin story; for the first time we can explain how all nearby star formation began," Catherine Zucker, an astronomer and data visualization expert formerly at Harvard and Smithsonian's Center for Astrophysics and author of the study, said in a statement. .

Because our home star set up shop inside the Local Bubble, every time we peer out at the sky, we're witness to tons of star births. .

"We can piece together the history of star formation around us using a wide variety of independent clues: supernova models, stellar motions and exquisite new 3D maps of the material surrounding the Local Bubble," Goodman said