Associated Universities, Inc. reposted this
Bubbles and summertime seem to go together - I just saw some kids blowing bubbles yesterday on my way home. Now imagine a bubble that is 75 times larger than the Sun. The stunning images in this article were taken by ALMA of gas bubbles that were 75 times larger than (our) Sun, on the surface of a distant star. Comparatively, if the kids yesterday had been blowing bubbles 75x larger, it would be the size of a large SUV. From a different perspective, 1.3 million Earths can fit into the Sun so 97.5 million Earths (holding 615 billion people collectively) would fit into a bubble on this distant star. On behalf of the NSF, we at AUI manage the North American contributions to ALMA in the Atacama Desert in Chile, and we are very proud of the achievements made every day by the large group of scientists, engineers, technical staff, administrative staff and others to make Big Science - in this case, running the best-in-class radioastronomy observatory - possible and give us these amazing scientific results and images. Next time you see someone blowing bubbles, I hope you are reminded of this really cool scientific discovery. Thank you NSF for allowing us to have this role in helping to Make Scientific Breakthroughs Possible! #aui #nrao #alma #bigscience #NSF #astronomyisamazing #scienceisfun https://lnkd.in/eYEY6rh9