Newly Discovered Ghostly Circles in the Sky Can’t Be Explained by Current Theories

Here's an interesting discovery made by a team of astronomers in 2019 they've called 'odd radio circles'. These are ghostly looking circles of radio emissions not explained by any known phenomena. The team's ruled out several possibilities and made some of their own guesses, but at this moment, these radio emissions are a mystery.

It'll be interesting to see what information further study of these can bring.

link

In September 2019 Anna Kapinska gave a presentation showing interesting objects she’d found while browsing our new radio astronomical data. She had started noticing very weird shapes she couldn’t fit easily to any known type of object.

Among them, labeled by Anna as WTF?, was a picture of a ghostly circle of radio emission, hanging out in space like a cosmic smoke-ring. None of us had ever seen anything like it before, and we had no idea what it was.

A few days later, Emil Lenc found a second one, even more spooky than Anna’s. Anna and Emil had been examining the new images from our pilot observations for the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) project, made with CSIRO’s revolutionary new Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope.

EMU plans to boldly probe parts of the universe where no telescope has gone before. It can do so because ASKAP can survey large swathes of the sky very quickly, probing to a depth previously only reached in tiny areas of sky, and being especially sensitive to faint, diffuse objects like these.

Our team searched the rest of the data by eye, and we found a few more of the mysterious round blobs. We dubbed them ORCs, which stands for “odd radio circles.” But the big question, of course, is: “what are they?”

We have ruled out several possibilities for what ORCs might be.

Could they be supernova remnants, the clouds of debris left behind when a star in our galaxy explodes? No. They are far from most of the stars in the Milky Way and there are too many of them.

Could they be the rings of radio emission sometimes seen in galaxies undergoing intense bursts of star formation? Again, no. We don’t see any underlying galaxy that would be hosting the star formation.

Could they be the giant lobes of radio emission we see in radio galaxies, caused by jets of electrons squirting out from the environs of a supermassive black hole? Not likely, because the ORCs are very distinctly circular, unlike the tangled clouds we see in radio galaxies.

Could they be Einstein rings, in which radio waves from a distant galaxy are being bent into a circle by the gravitational field of a cluster of galaxies? Still no. ORCs are too symmetrical, and we don’t see a cluster at their centre.

In our paper about ORCs, which is forthcoming in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, we run through all the possibilities and conclude these enigmatic blobs don’t look like anything we already know about.

So we need to explore things that might exist but haven’t yet been observed, such as a vast shockwave from some explosion in a distant galaxy. Such explosions may have something to do with fast radio bursts, or the neutron star and black hole collisions that generate gravitational waves.

Or perhaps they are something else entirely. Two Russian scientists have even suggested ORCs might be the “throats” of wormholes in spacetime.

The ghostly ORC1 (blue/green fuzz) on a backdrop of the galaxies at optical wavelengths. There’s an orange galaxy at the centre of the ORC, but we don’t know whether it’s part of the ORC, or just a chance coincidence. Image by Bärbel Koribalski, based on ASKAP data, with the optical image from the Dark

a reply to: dug88

Oh come on...
I saw that exact thing on Star Trek when I was a kid.
Kirk and Spock took care of it.

a reply to: Bluntone22

I too am leaning towards psychic cloudlike being consisting entirely of energy.

a reply to: Bluntone22

Well crap, that was my reply! These science guys better be careful or it's going to spawn in the Tycho system.

And stay the hell away from memory Alpha!!!

a reply to: dug88

Translucent all absorbing space blob.

a reply to: dug88

Alright so hear me out, when NASA shot off their own radio signals out into space. They didn't realize that there were creatures that exist made up of radio waves bound by some kind of as of yet unexplainable quantum physics stuff. The radio signal that NASA shot off was actually remarkably similar to the mating call of these creatures.

2021 is going to be the year of alien annihilation when these energy being get here and realize there is no energy alien vagina waiting for them.

Are they red shifting or blue? I'm too lazy to look.

originally posted by: dug88
a reply to: Bluntone22

I too am leaning towards psychic cloudlike being consisting entirely of energy.

AKA God.

a reply to: dug88

SEND IN THE PROBE!!!!

I'll worry about it next year.

It looks like an alien if you look at it upside down.

Don't ask how I figured that out a few hours before the New Year.

Camera!
Edit, deluded camera.

I like to probe everything. Gf hates it. I second

Send in the probes

What is the size and distance? Seems they were using a modern radio telescope.

originally posted by: MichiganSwampBuck
Are they red shifting or blue? I'm too lazy to look.

Unless you know something I don't, there's no way to tell with radio waves from an unknown source. The one image shown in the link has a galaxy at the center, but they don't know if that's related or just a coincidence. If they were related, then you could determine the redshift of the light from the galaxy at the center.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

originally posted by: MichiganSwampBuck
Are they red shifting or blue? I'm too lazy to look.

Unless you know something I don't, there's no way to tell with radio waves from an unknown source. The one image shown in the link has a galaxy at the center, but they don't know if that's related or just a coincidence. If they were related, then you could determine the redshift of the light from the galaxy at the center.

Their "black hole" just belched.

a reply to: Gothmog

Beans again ?

a reply to: dug88

That's Nagilum, for sure.....

a reply to: dug88

I love a good mystery, even though it can drive me crazy wanting an answer as to what the hell it is.