Vast bubble of galaxies discovered, given Hawaiian name "Hoʻoleilana"

UH News

A University of Hawaiʻi-led discovery of an immense bubble 820 million light years from Earth is believed to be a fossil-like remnant of the birth of the universe.

Astronomer Brent Tully from the UH Institute for Astronomy and his team unexpectedly found the bubble within a web of galaxies. The entity has been given the name Hoʻoleilana, a term drawn from the Kumulipo, a Hawaiian creation chant evoking the origin of structure.

The new findings published in The Astrophysical Journal, mention these massive structures are predicted by the Big Bang theory, as the result of 3D ripples found in the material of the early universe, known as Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO).

"We were not looking for it. It is so huge that it spills to the edges of the sector of the sky that we were analyzing,” explained Tully. “The very large diameter of one billion light years is beyond theoretical expectations.”

Astronomers located the bubble using data from Cosmicflows-4, which is to date, the largest compilation of precise distances to galaxies.

"I am the cartographer of the group, and mapping Hoʻoleilana in three dimensions helps us understand its content and relationship with its surroundings,” said researcher Daniel Pomarede of CEA Paris-Saclay University in France.

“It was an amazing process to construct this map and see how the giant shell structure of Hoʻoleilana is composed of elements that were identified in the past as being themselves some of the largest structures of the universe.”

Hoʻoleilana encompasses many well-known structures previously found by astronomers, such as the

• Harvard/Smithsonian Great Wall containing the Coma Cluster,
• The Hercules Cluster and
• The Sloan Great Wall.

The Boötes Supercluster resides at its center. The historic Boötes Void, a massive empty spherical region, also lies inside Hoʻoleilana.

Article : Ho'oleilana: An Individual Baryon Acoustic Oscillation? - Tully, Howlett, and Pomarède