Videos
YouTube and beyond
A suite of discoveries between 2020 and 2024, each of which revealed a completely un-anticipated phenomenon in the Milky Way near the Sun, served as the original motivation for this project. They include:
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 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. Please use this page to find publications and talks, visuals (images, interactives, and videos), history, team info, software, and data.
Astronomers analyzing 3D maps of the shapes and sizes of nearby molecular clouds have discovered a gigantic cavity in space.
The sphere-shaped void, described in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, spans about 150 parsecs — nearly 500 light years — and is located on the sky among the constellations Perseus and Taurus. The research team believes the cavity was formed by ancient supernovae that went off some 10 million years ago
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 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."