A recent reacceleration of the local bubble revealed by kinematics of young star associations

Zeng, Guang-Ya, Li, Guang-Xing, Chen, Bing-Qiu, Zhou, Ji-Xuan and Krause, Martin G. H. 2025. A recent reacceleration of the local bubble revealed by kinematics of young star associations. The Astrophysical Journal Letters 989 (1) , L13. 10.3847/2041-8213/adee05

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Abstract

The low-density region of the interstellar medium where the Sun is located is known as the Local Bubble, a cavity filled with high-temperature and low-density plasma that may be created by a series of supernova (SN) explosions over the past 14 Myr. However, the effects of these SN explosions on the formation and evolution of the Local Bubble, as well as on nearby star formation, remain not fully understood. To study the expansion history of the Local Bubble, we use the kinematic data of the young stars obtained by cross-matching the pre-main-sequence star catalog of E. Zari et al. with the high-precision astrometric and photometric data from the Gaia DR3 database. We perform a 3D spatial clustering analysis on these young stars to identify star associations. We discover three unique star associations that exhibit a wiggle-like velocity pattern. The distances of these star associations are 108.5308, 141.5284, and 176.0318 pc, respectively. Their radial velocities in the local standard of rest are 10.0622, 5.4982, and 9.0581 km s−1, showing a pattern of decreasing and then increasing. This velocity pattern, as predicted by M. G. H. Krause and R. Diehl, is caused by a recent reacceleration affected by the SN explosion, reinforcing the picture of the Local Bubble as an evolving entity.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Physics and Astronomy
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, Type: cc-by
Publisher:	American Astronomical Society
ISSN:	2041-8205
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	14 August 2025
Date of Acceptance:	9 July 2025
Last Modified:	14 Aug 2025 09:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/180423

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