4 mysterious objects spotted in deep space are unlike anything ever seen

There's a new paper that details the discovery of these objects.

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).

www.livescience.com...

Here's the paper on the discovery.

Unexpected Circular Radio Objects at High Galactic Latitude

We have found an unexpected class of astronomical objects which have not previously been reported, in the Evolutionary Map of the Universe Pilot survey, using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope. The objects appear in radio images as circular edge-brightened discs about one arcmin diameter, and do not seem to correspond to any known type of object. We speculate that they may represent a spherical shock wave from an extra-galactic transient event, or the outflow, or a remnant, from a radio galaxy viewed end-on.

arxiv.org...

Any thoughts on what they might be?

Motherships what else.

Right on time going to come in and pay Earth a visit good time huh

originally posted by: neoholographic
There's a new paper that details the discovery of these objects.

Any thoughts on what they might be?

Maybe air conditioning vents...electrically driven and feeding a porthole from another universe.

New tools used in new ways = new questions.

Science at its best.

a reply to: neoholographic

My guess is they are Accretion disks surrounding a massive body, perhaps a black hole.

a reply to: neoholographic

These halos kill all sentient life in the galaxy capable of falling prey to the Flood, thereby starving the parasite of its food.

In no uncertain terms, it's thargoids.
We're screwed commanders o7.

Wow, those objects are pretty big. They're almost the same size as Jupiter in the sky!

Like phage said, this is what it's all about when it comes to astronomy!

I would like to take this opportunity to welcome our new alien overlords.

a reply to: StoolSample

*jumps in his Python with AX weapons and charges the FSD*

I've been training for this.

a reply to: neoholographic

The scientist's description is far too vague for me to be able to interpret their data.

They need to do better, this is rather garbage.

"Some weird # we found an unknown distance from the Milky Way's galactic plane, and Earth for that matter but we can't tell you the distance, is a new kind of something."

P.S. It's 1 arcminute across and the moon is 31arcminutes across, so you can assume they're 1/31 the size of the moon.

We used a bunch of amazing, cutting edge equipment to find them.
*drops nerdporn list*

a reply to: StoolSample

Good one 👍

a reply to: cynicalheathen

I'll jump in my Chieftain and immediately regret not engineering much on my fighters

Cool! Now this is what I come to ATS for!

originally posted by: FlyingSquirrel
a reply to: neoholographic

They need to do better, this is rather garbage.

"Some weird # we found an unknown distance from the Milky Way's galactic plane, and Earth for that matter but we can't tell you the distance, is a new kind of something."

Distances in space are difficult to measure, especially things that are far away. When we see a distant object, it's basically a 2D view we are getting of the thing.

For objects like stars that are relatively close to us (less than 10000 LY, but ideally 1600 LY or less), Parallax can be used -- which is akin to binocular vision. Parallax views a star from Earth twice in 6 month intervals when Earth is on two different sides of the Sun. By comparing the tiny difference from those two positions that a star as seen in the sky looks to be from other known distance objects, Trigonometry can be used to determine the distance from us.

Other methods are used for galaxies. For a galaxy, astronomers can use a certain kind of star known as a cepheid variable, which has a known luminosity. Since apparent brightness diminishes with distance, astronomers can tell how bright a cepheid looks to us in another galaxy and gauge the distance to that galaxy.

There are other methods and other cosmic rulers, but there are no simple direct methods of knowing the distance to most objects in the galaxy and universe. Using the various methods together as a springboard from one known cosmic ruler to another cosmic ruler is known as the Cosmic Distance Ladder

If these new objects are too far for parallax, we would then need to learn about the potential absolute brightness or other energy it gives off before we can figure out their distance.

originally posted by: StoolSample
In no uncertain terms, it's thargoids.
We're screwed commanders o7.

Maybe my FC will finally have any use

a reply to: KiwiNite

I figured I'd have no use for one