Our rarified neighbourhood

I've known about the Local Bubble since 1994's Guide to the Galaxy.

By happenstance, we're in a hole in space - "we" being the hole which our own Sun has inflated, inside that hole. Surrounding the solar bubble is a heliopause and, in the direction of our Sun's motion, a bow shock. Still, the interstellar gas around us is more vacuum-ey even than normal. As a result, Bussard doesn't work well here - so, that's out for the Proxima mission. Although we do get a fine view of stars in the bubble since there aren't so many clouds here. I guess that's what defines a "nearby" star from one that isn't, like TOI-2257 at "only" 188 light years.

The latest study on the Bubble now has the Bubble formed fourteen millions of years ago, from supernovae - plural. We're in the middle of where those suns went boom. So how come we're even... here? Because of that bow shock I mentioned: we are moving through space and, when those stars blew up, we weren't here yet. Now, after passing that wall, here we are.

That wall around the bubble has been forming new stars of its own. In fact, I wonder if the first bang seeded more mass into nearby stars, also not small, which also went bang. And/or those stars had been formed together in a wave of their own bubble-wall, having formed 14 million years before that.

At 1000 light years away, maximum, those stars we can see are massive too: the cycle stands to repeat, possibly starting with Betelgeuse already gone red. Maximum, because that 14 Mya star-formation (they say) accounts for ALL the biggies: Betelgeuse, and Rigel, Bellatrix and so on. Stands to reason the largest stars would have formed closer to the event when the shockwave was hardest. It might be we lucked out of one massive set of explosions just to fall victim to the aftershock.