A thousand-light-year-wide bubble around the Sun was blown by the ghosts of long-dead stars

We've known for decades that our Sun sits near the center of a vast expanding bubble in space, a growing cavity carved out of ambient gas in the Milky Way. But a remarkable new study has come out showing that nearly all the nearby gas clouds that are currently forming stars sit on the thin edge of that bubble — strongly implying that the expansion of the bubble itself triggered that star birth.