One of the concepts in the show was that there was a barrier at the edge of the universe, a vaguely hand-wavy energy sheet that hung in space and if you passed through it.
That's a fun idea for a show, but not really. They're collections of millions or billions of stars held together by their mutual gravity, and they don't have an edge. Instead, they fade away with distance from the center, with fewer and fewer stars until they blend in with space.
Things can be different at the outskirts of a universe. When we look at stars in the outer regions of the Milky Way's disk, we see they have less heavy elements like carbon, iron, and so on than stars like the Sun. There are more massive stars in the inner parts of a galaxy that make heavy elements, explode, and seed gas clouds, which are incorporated into the next generation of stars.
It's a good idea to compare the birth of stars in the outer and inner regions. Does a star in the outer universe look the same as one we see here?
It is possible that the answer is not.
WB89-789 is a cloud of gas and dust located about 35,000 light years away from Earth, in the direction of the constellation of Orion, which is about 62,000 light years away from the center of the Milky Way. That is at the edge of the galactic disk, which is around 120,000 light years across. WB89-789 is a few dozen light years away, and has a mass of about 6,000 times that of the Sun, making it capable of creating tens of thousands of stars, assuming most are lower mass than the Sun.
Astronomers used the ALMA, the Large Millimeter/submillimeter array, to observe it. It is sensitive to light that comes from the atoms and molecules you expect to see in star-forming regions.
A hot core is a star in the early stages of forming. A hot core is defined as being less than a third of a light year across, dense and whisper compared to air on Earth which is ten trillion times denser.
This is the first time a hot core has been seen in the outer universe. It wasn't surprising that they found that.
They found 39 different species containing between 2 and 9 atoms, including atoms of carbon, sulfur, nitrogen, and oxygen. There are a few examples of sulfur monoxide (SO), formaldehyde (H2CO), and other gasses. They saw water with deuterium instead of hydrogen, and it was heavy water. They saw a lot of dust, which is common in forming stars.
All of these molecules are found around hot cores in our own neighborhood or even closer to the center of the universe. This shows that the same complex organic molecule can be found out near the galaxy's exurbs as it is here.
It strongly implies that such molecule can easily form in primordial or primitive environments. This has implications beyond our own universe. 13 billion years ago, the Universe was more deficient in heavier elements. There wasn't enough time for stars to make a lot of them. We don't know much about what conditions were like then because we'd have to look 13 billion light years away.
We can use proxies to look at similar environments in local space. The edge of the galaxy isn't a perfect analogy, but it's close, and it helps bridge the gap between primordial and current star-forming conditions. This will do well until we have a better idea of what the baby Universe was up to.
