We Are Inside a Cosmic Hole And We Just Found Out Now

Earth is sitting inside a giant cavity in the Milky Way, carved out by exploding stars. Inside it, our Solar System is drifting through a cloud of gas and dust. For decades, the only way to study that cloud was through starlight passing through it. Then researchers melted 295 kilograms of Antarctic ice that froze between 40,000 and 81,000 years ago. Inside it, they found a handful of atoms of iron-60, a radioactive form of iron that only massive stars and supernovae produce. And there was less of it than in modern snow. ━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 Inside a bubble blown by exploding stars 1:18 A Bubble Full of Clouds 3:10 The Atom Earth Can't Make 4:57 The Snow That Shouldn't Have It 6:50 Two Suspects 9:20 A Needle in 50,000 Stadiums 12:22 Less Than Today 14:56 The Trail in the Ice ━━━━━━━━━━━━ 👨🏻‍💻Created By and Produced By: Rishabh Nakra 🎙️Narrated By: Jeffrey Smith ━━━━━━━━━━━━ PRIMARY SOURCE Koll, D. et al. (2026). "Local Interstellar Cloud Structure Imprinted in Antarctic Ice by Supernova Fe-60." Physical Review Letters, 136, 192701. @/nxjq-jwgp Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) @ Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility, Australian National University @ ON THE LOCAL BUBBLE Zucker, C. et al. (2022). "Star formation near the Sun is driven by expansion of the Local Bubble." Nature, 601, 334–339. @/s41586-021-04286-5 FURTHER READING ScienceAlert — Stardust Trapped in Antarctic Ice Reveals Earth's Journey Through the Cosmos @t-trapped-in-antarctic-ice-reveals-earths-journey-through-the-cosmos The Conversation — Dominik Koll on what the iron-60 in Antarctic ice reveals about our journey through the galaxy @ Universe Today — Iron and Ice: Earth's Passage Through the Interstellar Cloud @s/iron-and-ice-earths-passage-through-the-interstellar-cloud ICE CORE PROJECTS EPICA — European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica Beyond EPICA — Oldest Ice Core @ Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research @