Scientists Find Cosmic Bubbles

A team of astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has discovered cosmic bubbles in space which may alter scientists' views of how the universe was formed.

A series of explosions in space may have created gigantic bubbles, the team found. Galaxies are created when these bubbles collide with each other, the new study suggests.

Astronomers say that if the bubble theory is borne out, it could disprove theories that attribute the formation of the universe to the force of gravity.

"Stars exploded, left holes in space and subsequently pushed the matter outwards due to force of the blast," said Smithsonian Professor of Astronomy John P. Huchra, one of the astronomers.

He likened the event to the detonation of a hydrogen bomb in an underground cavern: all matter moved to the fringes in the shape of a shell leaving the core relatively empty. Galaxies were the direct result of the separate waves in multiple explosions colliding, which caused a large deposit of high density matter, the scientists said.

"The explosions could have been the result of novae or supernovae, but they would have had to have been exceptionally strong to result in such a blast," said Senior Staff Astronomer Margaret J. Geller, another member of the research team.

Huchra, Geller and Valerie de Lapparent, a graduate student, had to conduct most of their research at the Smithsonian's 1.5-meter telescope in the desert of Arizona because the air in Boston was too thick for accurate observation.

The "Bubble theory" was first proposed in 1981 by Jeremiah P. Ostriker of Princeton University and Lenox W. Cowie of Johns Hopkins University.

Theorists have previously sugested that the bubble structure is related to transitions in the nature of matter during the earliest history of the universe, which scientists believe is between 10 and 20 billion years old.

"We did not expect to find these results, and it was such a surprise that we almost fell off our chairs," said Huchra of the findings, in what he called the deepest study ever of the northern sky.

The results of the researchers' work will have little impact as to determining the age of the universe, but the data will probably lower the estimates of the quantity of mass in the universe, researchers said.

Geller gave a preliminary version of the report to the American Astronomical Society meeting in Houston, and found "the scientific community very interested in our work."

She said that in future experiments, test strips will be made to greater depths in space to include galaxies which cannot be seen by the human eye.