Billion-light-year-wide ‘Bubble of Galaxies’ Discovered

An artist's representation of the 'bubble of galaxies' Ho'oleilana, which spans a billion light years
An artist’s representation of the ‘bubble of galaxies’ Ho’oleilana, which spans a billion light years.

Astronomers have discovered the first “bubble of galaxies,” an almost unimaginably huge cosmic structure thought to be a fossilized remnant from just after the Big Bang sitting in our galactic backyard.

The bubble spans a billion light years, making it 10,000 times wider than the Milky Way galaxy.

Yet this giant bubble, which cannot be seen by the naked eye, is a relatively close 820 million light years away from our home galaxy, in what astronomers call the nearby universe.

The bubble can be thought of as “a spherical shell with a heart,” Daniel Pomarede, an astrophysicist at France’s Atomic Energy Commission, told AFP.

Inside that heart is the Bootes supercluster of gala...

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Study hints at the Existence of the Closest Black Holes to Earth in the Hyades Star Cluster

Image of the Hyades star cluster. Image: Jose Mtanous

Black holes are one of the most mysterious and fascinating phenomena in the Universe. A paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society hints at the existence of several black holes in the Hyades cluster – the closest open cluster to our solar system – which would make them the closest black holes to Earth ever detected...

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Machine Learning Contributes to Better Quantum Error Correction

ai-generated image
An AI-generated image illustrating the work

Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Quantum Computing have used machine learning to perform error correction for quantum computers—a crucial step for making these devices practical—using an autonomous correction system that despite being approximate, can efficiently determine how best to make the necessary corrections.

In contrast to classical computers, which operate on bits that can only take the basic values 0 and 1, quantum computers operate on “qubits”, which can assume any superposition of the computational basis states...

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Exercise-induced Hormone Irisin may Reduce Alzheimer’s Disease Plaque and Tangle Pathology in the Brain

Reconstitution of amyloid plaques and NFT pathlogy. (Dooyeon Kim/Massachusetts General Hospital)

Medical researchers have used a 3D human neural cell culture model to show that the exercise-induced muscle hormone, irisin, reduces the level of amyloid beta deposits associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Researchers who previously developed the first 3D human cell culture models of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) that displays two major hallmarks of the condition — the generation of amyloid beta deposits followed by tau tangles — have now used their model to investigate whether the exercise-induced muscle hormone irisin affects amyloid beta pathology.

As reported in the journal Neuron, the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)-led team has uncovered promising results suggesting that irisin-b...

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