It's 1,000 light-years wide and the source of all our star friends.
Leah Hustak (STScI) Once upon a time in galactic history, a cluster of stars detonated to form fantastical supernovas. The blasts were so strong their sparkly leftovers pushed the surrounding shroud of interstellar gas outward until it drifted into a cosmic bubble 1,000 light-years wide -- a giant blob that's still growing as you read this. By sheer coincidence, experts say, our very own sun flew directly into this bubble. Now we live smack in the middle of it, earning the globule a fitting name: the Local Bubble. And in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists offer novel details of the bubble's saga using a 3D map of the enormous structure. Most surprisingly, they found it's the main reason we have an oddly rich neighborhood of young stars. "This is really an origin story; for the first time we can explain how all nearby star formation began," Catherine Zucker, an astronomer and data visualization expert formerly at Harvard and Smithsonian's Center for Astrophysics and author of the study, said in a…