Mysterious ghostly circles found in Earth's night sky

It's a shocking discovery!

A group of researchers at the University of Western Sydney in Australia have discovered mysterious smoke ring-like strange circles invisible in visible light in the night sky, appearing like ghosts in space, unmeasured distance, unknown size and distance, unexplained by any currently known physical phenomenon, and two Russian scientists even believe that it could be the throat of the legendary wormhole.

The mysterious, strange smoke ring was first discovered in September 2019 by Anna Kandinsky, a researcher at the University of Western Sydney, who was browsing data from the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) project obtained by the Australian Square Kilometer Array (ASKAP) radio telescope when Kandinsky noticed a radiant, ghostly circle hanging in the night sky like a smoke ring.

A few days later, his colleague Emil Rene spotted a second, even weirder than Kandinsky's discovery, and scientists have since found several more such strange circles in the universe. The researchers estimate that there may be at least 1,000 more of these strangely shaped invisible odd circles in space, requiring artificial intelligence machine learning to fully discover them, and the researchers have named them weird radio circles (ORCs).

The Australian Square Kilometer Array Radio Telescope, located at the Murchison Radio Observatory in west-central Australia, can monitor large areas of the sky extremely quickly, detecting depths previously only attainable in very small areas of the sky and being particularly sensitive to objects with halo-like dispersion. Researchers thought they might detect many unexpected phenomena before the telescope was launched, and did not expect to find so many so soon.

So what exactly is the strange radio circle and what physical phenomenon is it formed by? After ruling out various possibilities, scientists believe that there is no known physical phenomenon to explain.

At first, scientists thought there might be a problem with the software of the Square Kilometer Array, suspecting possible imaging artifacts, but observations with other radio telescopes confirmed that they were real, thus ruling out problems with the telescope itself.

But scientists observing with optical telescopes were unable to see these objects, which is very puzzling because such radial rings are usually caused by electron clouds, so why can't anything be seen in the visible band?

One possibility is that these are the remnants of supernova explosions, clouds of debris left behind by exploding stars, but they are far away from most stars in the galaxy, and there are too many of them to far exceed the frequency of supernova explosions.

A second possibility is that radio emission rings are sometimes seen in galaxies that experience intense star-forming bursts, but scientists have not observed such galaxies.

A third possibility is the huge radio emission flaps (lobes) formed by electron ejections around supermassive black holes in radio galaxies, but such flaps tend to form tangled clouds, whereas ORCs are round.

A fourth possibility is Einstein rings, where radio waves from distant galaxies are bent into a circle by the gravitational field of galaxy clusters, but this is not the case, since there are no galaxy clusters in the middle of the circle.

Since none of the known astronomical phenomena match, and since the distance of these ghostly smoke rings cannot be measured, there is no way to know whether they are intergalactic or extragalactic objects, and therefore no way to know their exact size. If they are inside the Milky Way, they could be a few light years in diameter, while outside the Milky Way, they could be millions of light years in diameter.

Scientists are puzzled. They speculate that the ORCs could come from a huge shock wave from some unknown explosion in a distant galaxy, which could be related to a fast radio burst, or a gravitational wave from the collision of a neutron star black hole. Two Russian scientists, on the other hand, have brainstormed that it could be the throat of a wormhole in space-time.

What exactly ORCs are may require more observations and research to be understood. As more and more advanced observational equipment is built, more strange astronomical phenomena may await us in the future. The more these mysterious phenomena are solved, the deeper our understanding of the universe will be, and the human vision will become more and more open, touching the essence of the universe more and more deeply, thus leading human civilization to a more distant world.