Ho’olei frijoles! Big #astrophysics discovery! And I do mean big…

Meet Ho’oleilana. This bodacious bubble is our neighbor. It’s a billion light years wide. It’s made of galaxies now, but it was formed during the time before *atoms* existed.

Back then the whole universe was a sea of plasma, like the interior of the sun but *everywhere*. And when the universe expanded and cooled, some of the teeny subatomic-sized ripples and wiggles and bubbles got SWOLE and became the scaffolding on which dust and stars clumped and ignited. This effect — called Baryon Acoustic Oscillation — was predicted in 1970 but this is our first direct observation of one.

The Hawaiian name Ho’oleilana comes from the Kumulipo creation chant: “Ho’oleilei ka lana a ka Po uliuli” (From deep darkness came murmurs of awakening).

Here’s an interactive 3D graph you can spin around to get a sense of the scale and shape of this absolute unit: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/cosmography-of-hooleilana-a871418f1a3b4afc89f5cda9f3a70c53

Among other implications, this explains why the Boötes Void is empty!

And here’s the source thread by one of the discoverers with lots more links and explanations: https://mastodon.social/@pomarede/111012490271320497

#introduction start:

I'm Claudia, #transgender / (#autigender), #ActuallyAutistic & #ActuallyKinetic (#AuDHD), #pluralgang, all wrapped in an outer shell of #SoftwareEngineer like chocolate.

I'm almost 33, finally working towards recovering from Burnout, and trying to accept a #CPTSD diagnosis that my 🧠brain seems to want to disbelieve or deny.

I don't really know what all my interests are through the #anhedonia and this whole identity crises, but it's not my first identity crisis by any stretch, nor my first Burnout.

So far the topics that I've recognized either spark joy or are mostly escapism:
- #books (mainly fiction, scifi, fantasy, etc.)
- #tv & #movies (again mostly fiction)
- #music (tainted interest in folk metal I can sometimes still access, but mostly just repeating one playlist we found on Spotify inspired by the song "space girl" by Frances Forever)
- #space (& #AstroPhysics, #cosmology, speculation and daydreaming)
- #MentalHealth & #SocialJustice (I'm real big on improving myself, I want to be someone I can like and respect someday)

I'd really like to incorporate new hobbies or revive old ones I've long abandoned from discouragement and disillusionment. I want to make music, draw, maybe even write.
Burnout & Anhedonia are making this hard right now, but I figure that I'm stuck now living without any exit strategy, so I'd like to figure some way to tolerate it better and not find myself back in Burnout like this ever again.

I'm still isolating through a third year of... this whole you know what I'm talking about thing. I'm sad and lonely and sometimes that leaks out into the Surface Self, but I usually just pretend to be OK bc it's upsetting to me to imagine how off-putting or sad it might make my friends to know 🤐😅