Talk:Local Bubble

Diagram needed
It's unclear from the existing picture what the Loop I, II, and III bubbles are, and how they related to the Local Interstellar Cloud. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Beland (talk • contribs) 00:26, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

The Local Bubble has an irregular shape more like a deformed tunnel. You can see 2D maps of the Local Bubble and surroundings at http://www.aanda.org/index.php?option=article&access=doi&doi=10.1051/0004-6361:20031214 an article about the mapping of the dense interstellar gas around the Local Bubble. I've created a java application at http://www.3dgalaxymap.com/Galaxy/ which shows a 3D map of the Local Bubble and surroundings based on that article. What I can say for sure is that the Local Bubble is situated somewhat at the center of the Orion Arm and it intersects Loop I and superbubble GSH 238+00+09. I haven't found any reliable info on Loop II and III.--Raydekk (talk) 10:02, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Age of the local bubble
Can someone explain how "the Local Bubble is the result of supernovae that exploded within the past two to four million years" but "The Solar System has been travelling through the Local Bubble for the last five to ten million years." --Raerth (talk) 21:32, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Must be billion, not million.... no? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.66.230.182 (talk) 21:22, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

No, it's definitely millions of years we're talking about here, not billions. But the screwup mentioned by Raerth is not the only problem. The article says the Local Bubble was most likely created by Geminga, but the article on the Geminga says that star went supernova only 300,000 years ago! So, there are a lot of wildly inconsistent dates here.

A | NASA webpage says the Local Bubble was caused by a supernova about 2 million years ago located in Sco-Cen. I presume that's different than Geminga?

We need to straighten out this story. If nobody knows what's going on, we should admit that. John Baez (talk) 13:36, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Geminga may have created the loop 1 bubble which the local bubble is colliding into. causing the fluff clouds

How about an estimate of the number of stars in the Local Bubble?
Does anyone have an estimate of the number of stars in the Local Bubble? There are only 3 shown in the drawing. But there have to be 100s or 1000s of stars in the Local Bubble. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.38.229.40 (talk) 12:01, 2 September 2011 (UTC)


 * If the density of the neighborhood near Sol is representative, then the number of stars within the spherical region defined by radius R (in light years) can be estimated by: (4/3) * pi * R**3 / 66. Plugging in a radius of 150 light years (sources conflict on this btw; some say the bubble is 300 light years across, others say 400), we get 214199 stars.  Applying the numbers from the table at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_classification#Harvard_spectral_classification to this number, we can estimate the population by star type as: zero O, 279 B, 1285 A, 6426 F, 16279 G, 25918 K, and 163756 M .. which doesn't add up, but neither do the fractions from that table. Presumably the balance is other oddball stellar types.  TTK (talk) 02:20, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Impact on solar system?

 * Anyone have an idea (or a scientific discussion) of how the solar system is affected by being within this bubble? Apparently the gas of the medium within the lobe is a)much thinner but b)hotter than in the regular ISM. Does this affect the sun, the earth or us in any way? 83.254.151.33 (talk) 13:00, 26 August 2013 (UTC)


 * At an ignorant guess, no, nothing gassy can come here into the Heliosphere. Naturally we're all awaiting the overdue news of Voyager 1 crossing the Heliopause and confirming the usual theories about our local ISM. Jim.henderson (talk) 17:40, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Local Bubble. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20131121000528/http://chips.ssl.berkeley.edu/chips.html to http://chips.ssl.berkeley.edu/chips.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 21:47, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

About the [Dubious-Discuss] in the local bubble densities.
Does the density include helium? It does not? Is it the gas density? It is not? Helium adds a 40% of the mass of hydrogen in the Milky Way. And the reference [4] simply doesn't exist. Grausvictor (talk) 10:47, 9 March 2019 (UTC)
 * the wording in the article is clear. the region is defined by hydrogen gas density not by total gas. you can do a better job at tracing references if you use the wayback machine, -- 135.23.66.249 (talk) 18:18, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

Remains excited?
I'll remove this nonsense: "... ten to twenty million years. The gas remains in an excited state, emitting in the X-ray band.[5][6]" It violates basic physics (states that could radiate x-ray deexcite in tiny fractions of a second, not millions of years), and is not supported by the sources either. They just talk about neutral(!) helium, allowing solar wind ions to radiate x-ray by charge transfer.WikiPidi (talk) 12:00, 3 June 2022 (UTC)