When you’re a kid, you look up in the night sky and see the moon and the stars. That’s usually all you think about. Later, you learn that some of these stars are actually planets, and others are really nebulae, comets, or even distant galaxies.

But there are heavenly objects that can’t be seen by our eyes, or even our most powerful telescopes on Earth. No, sometimes. there are things out in the universe that can only be detected by special equipment, like the eROSITA, an x-Ray observatory positioned in outer space and capable of detecting truly bizarre outer space phenomenon, such as an interstellar tunnel scientists have dubbed the Local Hot Bubble.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute have released new findings about this interstellar bubble thanks to analysis and modeling from the data returned from eROSITAs all-sky survey. They found a large-scale temperature gradient in the bubble, and believe it’s “possibly linked with past supernova explosions that expanded and reheated the bubble.”

Their research, recently published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, indicates the tunnel points to the Constellation Centaurus, and may join our local “Hot Bubble” to neighboring super bubbles.

These phenomenon are only capable of being detected due to eROSITA’s position in outer space, at a distant orbit far beyond the “contamination” of Earth’s corona. We cannot detect this interstellar X-Ray radiation in any other manner.

eROSITA is part of the German-Russian space observatory Spektr-RG, and is currently not operating due to geopolitical issues, but scientists are still analyzing the data it returned before 2022.

These latest findings produced a 3-D map of the bubble and deepened our understanding of the cosmic soup in which we’re all swimming.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.