Why?

The Radcliffe Wave is a gigantic structure that defines the shape of the Sun's local neighborhood in the Milky Way Galaxy.  Its existence was first presented officially in a paper published in Nature (by Alves et al.)  on January 7, 2020.  Its website  offers scientists, educators, and the interested public much more information about the "RadWave," as we like to call it.  At that RadWave site, you can find publications and talks, visuals (images, interactives, and videos), history, team info, software, and data. 

The sphere-shaped void named the "Perseus Taurus Supershell,) described in the Astrophysical Journal Letters (by Bialy et al), spans about 150 parsecs — nearly 500 light years — and is located on the sky among the constellations Perseus and Taurus. It's likely that the cavity was formed by ancient supernovae that went off some 10 million years ago. 

The publication of this result contains the first-ever augmented reality figure in an AAS Journal. Click here to enlarge the interactive figure above, and try the AR by scanning the QR codes. 

The discovery that the 1000-light-year-wide "Local Bubble" surrounding the Sun and Earth is responsible for the formation of all nearby, young stars was first presented in a paper published in Nature (by Zucker et al.) on January 12, 2022. Please use this page to find news, publications and talks, visuals(images, interactives, and videos), team info, and data. 

Analysis of 3D dust maps and star cluster dynamics points to supernovae as having created the conditions that formed the star-factories we now know as the "Orion Molecular Clouds."  You can read more about these findings in the publication by Foley et al. 2023--and do try its interactive figure too.

The Radcliffe Wave was called a "wave" in 2020, but it took 4 more years, to use new stellar clustering approaches and analyses of gas dynamics, to show that it really does wave.  Read more about this in Konietzka et al. 2024's Nature paper, and at the RadWave website, where you can find publications and talks, visuals (images, interactives, and videos), history, team info, software, data--and the first animated augmented reality view of the RadWave that you can see on your phone!

Once thought to be an enclosed shell of hot interstallar gas around the Sun, the 2024 paper by O'Neill et al. offers new models of the 3D dust structures at the "walls" of the Local Bubble that suggest its blown it's "top" off, and is actually a Local Chimney.  The paper also offers many interactive figures highlighting the Local Bubble's relationship to other structures being studied as part of MilkyWay3D.org.