Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Local Bubble, also called the Local Cavity, is a large, sparsely filled region of the interstellar medium in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way. It is estimated to be at least 1,000 light years in size, with a gas density of about 0.05 atoms per cubic centimeter, roughly one tenth the galactic average. The Solar System currently resides within the Local Bubble, inside a denser sub-region called the Local Interstellar Cloud.
The Local Bubble was formed by multiple supernovae that exploded within the past ten to twenty million years. Research points to subgroups of the Scorpius-Centaurus association, specifically Lower Centaurus-Crux (LCC) and Upper Centaurus-Lupus (UCL), with between 14 and 20 supernovae from those groups thought to have excavated both the Local Bubble and the neighboring Loop I Bubble.
The Solar System has been traveling through the region occupied by the Local Bubble for approximately five to ten million years. Its current position is within the Local Interstellar Cloud, a denser pocket of gas that formed where the Local Bubble and the Loop I Bubble met.
Radioactive isotopes in deep-sea ferromanganese crusts, Antarctic snow, and lunar soil record the nearby supernovae that created the Local Bubble. Iron-60 and manganese-53 show a concentration peak between 1.7 and 3.2 million years ago, linked to the Solar System's entry into the Local Bubble around 4.5 million years ago. A second iron-60 peak at 6.5-8.7 million years ago may trace to an even older passage through the Orion-Eridanus Superbubble.
Yes. A paper published in the journal Nature in January 2022 concluded that the expanding surface of the Local Bubble collected gas and debris and triggered the formation of all young, nearby stars. Structures including the Taurus molecular cloud and the Pleiades open star cluster formed along the bubble's rim.
Several missions studied the Local Bubble, including the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (1992-2001) and CHIPSat, launched in February 2003 and active until April 2008. In 2019, the first three-dimensional map of the Local Bubble was reported using diffuse interstellar band observations, and in 2020 the shape of its dusty envelope was modeled from stellar extinction data.