Posted on 07/08/2020 3:37:51 PM PDT by BenLurkin
There's something unusual lurking out in the depths of space: Astronomers have discovered four faint objects that at radio wavelengths are highly circular and brighter along their edges. And they're unlike any class of astronomical object ever seen before.
The objects, which look like distant ring-shaped islands, have been dubbed odd radio circles, or ORCs, for their shape and overall peculiarity. Astronomers don't yet know exactly how far away these ORCs are, but they could be linked to distant galaxies. All objects were found away from the Milky Way's galactic plane and are around 1 arcminute across (for comparison, the moon's diameter is 31 arcminutes).
After ruling out objects like supernovas, star-forming galaxies, planetary nebulas and gravitational lensing — a magnifying effect due to the bending of space-time by nearby massive objects — among other things, the astronomers speculate that the objects could be shockwaves leftover from some extragalactic event or possibly activity from a radio galaxy.
With only four of these peculiar objects discovered so far, the astronomers can't yet tease out the true nature of these structures. But the EMU survey is just beginning, and astronomers expect it to reveal more unusual objects.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
ping
Maybe it’s Uranus.
I’ll send you a picture of both and you can decide for yourself.
Kewl
Paging Larry Niven
I can’t help but think of the scene in Canadian Bacon where they are trying to come up with a new cold war enemy to gin up the economy.
Aliens from space were rejected too.
You owe me a keyboard sir
It’s the Arkylians and they’re coming for the Galaxy.
Astronomers Have Traced a Single Neutrino to a Collision 3.8 Billion Light-Years Away
Thanks BenLurkin.
Silly scientists ... its the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
If it happened 3.8 billion years ago, shouldn't it be an oldtrino by now?
Does dark matter matter?
Clint Eastwood made a movie about that.
Like smoke rings, only spewed from a dying black hole as gravity rings.
Radio galaxies and their relatives, radio-loud quasars and blazars, are types of active galaxy nuclei that are very luminous at radio wavelengths, with luminosities up to 1039 W between 10 MHz and 100 GHz.[1] The radio emission is due to the synchrotron process. The observed structure in radio emission is determined by the interaction between twin jets and the external medium, modified by the effects of relativistic beaming. The host galaxies are almost exclusively large elliptical galaxies. Radio-loud active galaxies can be detected at large distances, making them valuable tools for observational cosmology. Recently, much work has been done on the effects of these objects on the intergalactic medium, particularly in galaxy groups and clusters.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.