www.9news.com.au
A team of Australian
astronomers have captured a series of inexplicable ghostly circles in space they believe show a completely new type of space object.
The strange new objects were captured using a revolutionary new Australian telescope developed by the CSIRO.
The first was captured by the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) project manager,
Anna Kapinska, in September last year but the research team have since discovered several more.
The astronomers have been unable to explain what is causing the rings of radio emissions, which they have dubbed 'odd radio circles' (ORCs).
However, other telescopes have confirmed they are real and not the result of a software error with the new telescope.
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Even more bizarrely, the ghostly blobs don't appear in images taken with optical telescopes.
"None of us had ever seen anything like it before, and we had no idea what it was," Western Sydney University's
Professor Ray Norris wrote of the discovery.
"The rings of radio emission are probably caused by clouds of electrons, but why don't we see anything in visible wavelengths of light?
"We don't know but finding a puzzle like this is the dream of every astronomer."
Professor Norris said the objects could be in our own galaxy and measure a few light years across, or be far away across the universe and span millions of light years.
The mysterious objects were discovered using a powerful new telescope developed by the CSIRO –
the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) – located in outback Western Australia.
The much-anticipated new technology made headlines around the world earlier this week for breaking records by
mapping out three million new galaxies in just 300 hours – work that took other telescopes as long as 10 years.