Remnant Galaxies from Universe's Inception

The red region (left) shows the shell enclosed by the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation, with individual galaxies depicted as luminous tiny specks. The blue filaments show the greater Cosmic Web, with previously known features like Laniākea highlighted. Credit: Frédéric Durillon, Animea Studio; Daniel Pomarède, IRFU, CEA University Paris-Saclay. This work benefited from a government funding by France 2030 (P2I – Graduate School of Physics) under reference ANR-11-IDEX-0003



Astronomers have identified an immense bubble, Hoʻoleilana, 820 million light years away. This structure, believed to be a remnant from the universe’s inception and larger than predicted, offers valuable insights into galaxy evolution and the universe’s expansion dynamics.


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 on September 5 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).

The Unexpected Find
“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. “As an enhancement in the density of galaxies, it is a much stronger feature than expected. 

The very large diameter of one billion light years is beyond theoretical expectations. If its formation and evolution are in accordance with theory, this BAO is closer than anticipated, implying a high value for the expansion rate of the universe.”

Astronomers located the bubble using data from Cosmicflows-4, which is to date, the largest compilation of precise distances to galaxies. Tully co-published the exceptional catalog in the fall of 2022. 

His team of researchers believe this may be the first time astronomers identified an individual structure associated with a BAO. The discovery could help bolster scientists’ knowledge of the effects of galaxy evolution.     READ MORE...

Dark Energy On Earth

DARK ENERGY ISN’T just dark — it's nigh invisible.

Hypothesized by physicists to drive the accelerating expansion of the universe, dark energy has never been directly observed or measured. Instead, scientists can only make inferences about it from its effects on the space and matter we can see.


Finding measurable hints of dark energy’s effects on distance objects — and the shape of space itself — is a major goal of major NASA missions, such as the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

But in a new paper published September 15 in the journal Physical Review D a group of cosmologists suggests researchers might not need to peer deep into the cosmos to make second-hand observations of dark energy — it may have been detected right here on Earth.

WHAT’S NEW — In the paper, the researchers claim that hints of dark energy were detected at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy during an experiment designed to detect dark matter.

The team, comprised mostly of theorists, looked at data from the XENON1T, an experiment designed to detect rare interactions between hypothetical dark matter particles and components of the noble gas xenon held in a special detector.

The odds that dark energy has been detected directly are admittedly low, Jeremy Sakstein, assistant professor of theoretical physics at the University of Hawaii and one of the paper’s authors, tells Inverse.

“There are other explanations for this signal as well,” he says, and at the moment, “we don't know whether it's just a statistical anomaly.”

Statistically, there is a 5 percent chance the detection was an anomaly. The detection of the 2012 discovery Higgs Boson, by comparison, was much more certain — there was only a chance in about 3.5 million that detection was anomalous.  READ MORE...