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| Paper: |
The Age of the Local Interstellar Bubble |
| Volume: |
451, 9th Pacific Rim Conference on Stellar Astrophysics |
| Page: |
315 |
| Authors: |
Abt, H. A. |
| Abstract: |
The Local Interstellar Bubble is an irregular-shaped region that happens to be centered on the Sun. It has minimum and maximum radii of 50 and 150 pc. The density inside the bubble is 1/200 of that outside and the temperature is about 1 million K. Therefore the density times the temperature at the borders is constant, so the bubble is stable and can be very old. It was evidently cleared of interstellar gas by one or more supernovae. Because of the low density, no new stars could have been formed in the bubble since the supernovae explosions. We looked for the youngest stars within the bubble. In the central region they are B7 so that region is about 160 million years old. The Pleiades lobe has B3 stars so it is about 60 million years old. The lobe toward the galactic center has O9.5 stars so it is about 4 million years old. In fact, it has a pulsar with a spin-down time of 3.76 million years, so that must be the remnant of the supernova that created that region. The bubble has measureable OVI and CII lines, but no HI, confirming its high temperature. The Sun was probably formed elsewhere and happened to drift into the bubble some millions of years ago. The full text of this talk was published in the Astronomical Journal (Abt 2011). |
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