"And Make it Look Like an Accident" - Plausible Settings for Epic Science Fiction

While preparing tomorrow morning's posts for another blog, I ran into an article about a huge cloud of hydrogen and helium in our neighborhood - 'neighborhood' on a galactic scale, anyway. Barring unforeseen circumstances and gremlins, it'll be on Apathetic Lemming of the North in about 17 hours. Look for a post titled "Our Sun and The Fluff."

There were a few intriguing points about the article I was micro-reviewing for that post, and while checking some of them out I ran into references to the Local Bubble, the Gum Nebula, and other fairly large-scale features within fifteen thousand light-years of us.

The best illustration I've found yet, as a one-stop introduction to the area immediately around our sun isn't at its original URL any more. Either that, or their server is down at the moment. I did, however, find a copy of it, with a pretty good description, here:

• "Astronomy Picture of the Day"
  a service of LHEA at NASA/GSFC & Michigan Tech. U. (February 17, 2002)
• "The Local Bubble and the Galactic Neighborhood"
  NASA Images - a service of the Internet Archive (Linda Huff (American Scientist) (April 12, 2000?)
  • This one's a zoomable version of the illustration, with links

I'm still digging around, to see if I can find a moderately large-scale event roughly 10 to 30 million years back, that left a mark like the Gum Nebula or Local Bubble: that I can make look like a serious industrial accident.

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Update (December 28, 2009)

I may be on to something here:

• "The History of the Local ISM: The Last 50 Million Years"
  Goyette, J.; Bruhweiler, F. C.; Pitts, M.; Gabel, J. - American Astronomical Society, 198th AAS Meeting, #65.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 33, p.884