A radio observatory in South Africa has acquired the sharpest picture to date of a large and enigmatic cosmic phenomenon. The so-called “odd radio circle,” which is 16 times the size of our Milky Way galaxy and spans around a million light-years wide, has captivated scientists since it was found in 2019 and has been a source of fascination to this day.
[Credit: J. English (U. Manitoba)/EMU/MeerKAT/DES(CTIO)]
Merely 5 odd radio circles have really been identified since they were detected for the first time using an Australian telescope in 2019. Odd radio circles, or ORCs for brevity, are astronomical phenomena that cannot be seen using visible, infrared, or x-ray observatories.
Experts from the Inter-University Institute for Data-Intensive Astronomy in South Africa generated the picture of the massive, luminous circles with the aid of the MeerKAT telescope, that’s made up of 64 dish antennas.
Although there is currently no answer for what is causing the bizarre radio circles, the current evidence seems to indicate spherical rings centered around a galaxy when before, just a roundish clump could be seen. That additional information has assisted scientists in narrowing the field down to 3 top ideas: they might be the result of a massive eruption at the center of a galaxy, tremendous jets of radiation blasting out of the galaxy’s center, or rather the shock wave caused by the birth of stars.
It is well known that OCRs are rings of feeble electromagnetic emissions that encircle galaxies that contain a very energetic black hole at their center, but it is not yet clear what generates them or why they would be so uncommon in the universe.
The results of the multinational team of scientists on the strange radio circle were published in the British journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
