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The objects are far away, but they are not that far, so at least a few additional galaxies should be noticeable, he added.īoth Vedantham and Koribalski agree that more telescope observations in other wavelengths should help scientists get a better idea of what's going on. In a similar vein, the possibility that an ORC is an invisible galactic cluster isn't appealing to him because "it's kind of hard to hide a cluster," he said. The 18 biggest unsolved mysteries in physics "But the simplest answer is almost always correct." "You can construct an exotic scenario," he told Live Science. Vedantham is guided in this by the principle of Occam's razor, which prefers mundane explanations over strange, new ones. Koribalski isn't yet sure what type of event could leave such a signature, though perhaps it's a previously unknown product of crashing black holes such as the kind seen in gravitational waves at the Large Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States.īut Harish Vedantham, an astronomer at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy who was not associated with the work, favors the simpler idea - that the ORCs are a manifestation of a well-known phenomenon, and are bright jets shooting from a galaxy at a rarely seen angle. It's possible that some unknown but highly energetic event took place in the middle of these galaxies, creating a blast wave that traveled out as a sphere and resulted in a ring structure. "This could be something completely new." "The other explanation is more exciting," she said. Perhaps in the case of the ORCs, the jets are simply pointing directly towards our planet, Koribalski suggested, so that we are in essence looking down the barrel of a long tube, creating a circular, two-dimensional image around a central galaxy. Astronomers have often spotted such phenomena in the universe, though generally the jets align in such a way with Earth that observatories see them as moving out of the sides of the galaxy.
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These might simply be too faint to be picked up by current telescopes.Īnother possibility is that the central supermassive black hole of these galaxies is consuming gas and dust, producing humongous, cone-shape jets of particles and energy. The first is that perhaps there are additional galaxies forming a cluster near the object and bending bright material into a ring-like structure. The team has now narrowed their ideas down to three potential explanations, Koribalski said. They posted their findings on April 27 to the preprint database arXiv, and they have been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The researchers have since scanned the skies again with ASKAP and found one more ORC to add to their collection, an entity about 1 million light-years across located about 3 billion light-years away.