Violent explosion rips open a giant cavity in space and births new stars

There’s a monstrous hole in the universe. Long ago, a star blew up with extreme force and obliterated everything in its path. It even swept minuscule particles of space dust out of its way — but in a surprising turn of events, that space dust collected, collapsed and eventually gave birth to a bunch of baby stars. 

As the saying goes, it’s the circle of life.

“That is something that has been suggested in theory, and also seen in numerical simulations, but now we think we see it for the first time in observations,” said lead author Shmuel Bialy, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The story starts with a many-million-years-old, 500-light-year-wide spherical void lurking in outer space. To be clear, this completely vacant cavity is absolutely huge. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion kilometers), which means the void could fit 150,000 versions of our solar system within it.

Mysterious, seemingly abrupt cavities like this one are sometimes detected in the cosmos. They’re just sudden holes of empty space. But because astronomers typically study space in two dimensions — with spectrum data, or even photographs — three-dimensional structures can be tricky to find. Even when astronomers do locate them, it can be rather difficult to understand what’s going on.

“There’s a lot of confusion along the line of sight,” Bialy said. “You don’t know the distance, so sometimes we see different structures and they just look like one structure — or the opposite.”

Bialy’s team solved the problem by harnessing a new power: augmented reality. 

They re-created a mini-version of the gigantic space-borne cavity, as well as the stuff that surrounds it. Then they toyed with their model in real time to unlock the elusive void’s secrets. A QR code to the masterpiece is included in their paper, published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. There’s also a demo on YouTube.

Basically, you can download their reconstructed piece of space onto your phone and feel as though it’s in your room. “It’s almost like in the movies where you have a hologram,” Bialy said.

While surveying their digital sculpture for research purposes — as opposed to the frivolous fun I had while spinning the projection around on my coffee table — the team saw an unusual “shell” of material around a symmetrical, abandoned area: the giant cavity. 

They concluded that a nearly 10-million-year-old star explosion — or multiple star explosions over the timespan — pushed away particles in the vicinity, thus making a capsule of space dust encircling an uninhabited region of space. 

“Imagine … you have lots of dust from the floor,”…