An international team of astronomers has discovered a mysterious round objects visible in the radio and reminiscent of rings or bubbles. They were called ORC (Odd Radio Circles), and they do not correspond to known phenomena or artifacts that arise due to equipment defects. This was reported in an article published in the arXiv repository.
Spherical and round objects usually are remnants of supernovae, planetary nebulae, circumstellar shells, protoplanetary disks or zvezdopada the galaxy. Also, it may be distortion that occurs around bright objects. However, scientists have found that the detected objects do not correspond to any of these known types and represent a new class of celestial bodies.
The ORC was discovered by a radio telescope ASKAP in Australia, which did not allow to completely exclude the possibility of influence of the earth’s radio source. Later, however, the ORC revealed in the archival data of the Giant MetreWave radio telescope in India. The first two objects were also discovered by radio telescope of ATKA in Australia. All four ORC are above the plane of the galaxy and have a size corresponding to 3 percent of the size of the moon. However, the distance to them is unknown.
ORC is completely invisible in x-ray, optical or infrared wavelengths. Perhaps they had something to do with galaxies, but only two objects are in the same direction as the optically visible galaxy. Three ORC resemble a ring and one disk. Radiobacter objects does not match the planetary nebulae. Furthermore, three objects are located on a very small portion of the sky, eliminating the remnants of supernovae, which are rare. In the milky Way known only 350 supernova remnants.
According to scientists, the ORC can be a giant shock wave from a catastrophic event. Sources can be such transients as fast radio bursts, gamma-ray bursts and merging neutron stars. Due to the large angular size objects had to be far in the past.
