Astronomers find strange round objects in space

Astronomers find strange round objects in space
Astronomers find strange round objects in space
Anonim

Scientists have discovered mysterious objects in the Universe, which they called strange radio circles. Nobody knows what it is.

The discovery is described in the preprint of a scientific article published on the arXiv.org website.

Astronomers working with the Australian radio telescope ASKAP have discovered three mysterious objects. Another similar object was found by the authors in the archived data of the Indian radio telescope GMRT. This confirms that odd radio circles (ORCs) are real and not the product of a mistake by the Australian observatory staff.

"Unknown what" has a rounded shape. In this case, three of the four objects at the edges are brighter than in the center - they are a kind of rings or bubbles. All four objects are visible only in the radio range: they are not detected in the data of optical, infrared and X-ray telescopes.

ORC are not like any other famous celestial bodies, which is why they deserve their name. True, astronomers know several classes of round objects, but none of them is suitable for one reason or another. So, planetary nebulae have a different spectrum. Radio circles cannot be supernova remnants either: they are too rare, and it is extremely unlikely that four such objects "crowd" in a small area of the sky.

The apparent diameter of the ORC is about one arc-minute (roughly one-thirtieth of the lunar disk).

How big are these objects really? This is unknown because the distance to them remains a mystery. They can be relatively small and located in the Milky Way, or they can be larger than entire galaxies and be very far away. In both cases, the size visible from the Earth will be the same.

Image
Image

Images of mysterious radio circles.

Illustration by Ray P. Norris et al./arXiv (2020).

Astronomers are still inclined to think that ORCs are located outside the Milky Way. First, on the celestial sphere they are outside the plane of the Galaxy, where the vast majority of its stars and other objects are located. Secondly, when viewed from Earth, the centers of two of the four radio circles are their own galaxies.

Meanwhile, it cannot be ruled out that these galaxies have nothing to do with circles, but simply happened to be on their background. In other words, we are simply looking at these star systems through radio circles, just as we can look at the Sun through our outstretched fingers.

The authors suggest that they are dealing with a shock wave from some kind of cosmic cataclysm. Collisions of neutron stars, gamma-ray bursts, and fast radio bursts are cited as possible examples.

Another hypothesis is that we have a stream of matter flowing out of galaxies.

Meanwhile, none of the explanations answers all the questions that have arisen, so scientists have yet to figure out what they found.

The scientific work of the authors is sent for publication in the prestigious journal Nature Astronomy. At the moment it is being analyzed by experts involved by the magazine.

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