merelygifted:

Weird Circular Objects Observed in Space May Finally Be Explained

RAY NORRIS, THE CONVERSATION 21 MARCH 2022

In 2019, my colleagues and I discovered spooky glowing rings in the sky using CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope in Western Australia. The rings were unlike anything seen before, and we had no idea what they were.

We dubbed them odd radio circles, or ORCs. They continue to puzzle us, but new data from South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope are helping us solve the mystery.

We can now see each ORC is centered on a galaxy too faint to be detected earlier. The circles are most likely enormous explosions of hot gas, about a million light years across, emanating from the central galaxy.

Our paper showing these results has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.  …