- Astronomers may have discovered a new type of cosmic object.
- The strange objects are only visible in radio wavelengths.
- The international team posted their findings, which have not been peer-reviewed yet, to the preprint server arXiv and have submitted the paper to Nature Astronomy.
Astronomers spot four mysterious, circular objects in space using radio telescopes, reads an article in First Post.
Odd Radio Circles
Scientists first spotted the objects, which they’ve dubbed “Odd Radio Circles” (ORCs), in the heaps of data that were collected during a preliminary survey by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder’s Evolutionary Map of the Universe project, reports Live Science.
The ORCs are mostly circular (one is shaped like a disc) and three of them are brighter around the edges.
The mysterious objects can only be spotted with radio telescopes. They’re completely invisible to X-ray, optical and infrared telescopes. What’s more, they “do not seem to correspond to any known type of object,” the researchers write in their paper, which was published on the preprint website, arXiv.
“Circular features are well-known in radio astronomical images, and usually represent a spherical object such as a supernova remnant, a planetary nebula, a circumstellar shell, or a face-on disc such as a protoplanetary disc or a star-forming galaxy,” the researchers write.
Unexplored class of objects
The scientists speculate that the strange circular objects could be a spherical shock wave generated from the blast from powerful events such as fast radio bursts, gamma-ray bursts or neutron star mergers.
They say that the objects could be the result of looking at the jets of a radio galaxy down the end or might be a variety of different things, which have been spotted at the same time because of new observational capabilities.
“[The objects] may well point to a new phenomenon that we haven’t really probed yet. It may also be that these are an extension of a previously known class of objects that we haven’t been able to explore,” Live Science quoted Kristine Spekkens, an astronomer at the Royal Military College of Canada and Queen’s University, as saying. Spekkens was not involved with the new study.
- The three objects were spotted while mapping the night sky in radio frequencies.
- The mapping was done as a part of a pilot survey for a new project called the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU).
- The astronomers found the fourth one in archival data collected by the Giant MetreWave Radio Telescope in India.
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Source: First Post
