Scientists are still very much in the dark as far as how our solar system has formed, and it remains one of the great challenges in studying our neighborhood. But a new report out of the University of Chicago suggests that our solar system may have formed inside of a giant space bubble that was produced by a star dozens of times larger than our own sun.

The findings, published in the Astrophysical Journal, indicate that giant stars known as Wolf-Rayet stars, the hotteset in the universe, may have formed a bubble around a star causing dust and gas to be trapped inside, allowing even more stars to form.

At some point, the giant star disappeared either by collapsing into a black hole or through a supernova explosion, and the shell around our star would have collapsed. At that point, our solar system was born, and resulted in what we know today as our cosmic neighborhood. It’s certainly not a proven theory yet, but it’s one of the best explanations yet.

“The idea is that aluminum-26 flung from the Wolf-Rayet star is carried outwards on grains of dust formed around the star. These grains have enough momentum to punch through one side of the shell, where they are mostly destroyed–trapping the aluminum inside the shell,” said coauthor Vikram Dwarkadas, a research associate professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics.