Space puzzles introduce a new phenomenon to the list…astronomers have documented something called “single radio circuits”…and there’s a lot of head scratching going on.
ORCs were first discovered by astronomers in 2020, using the Australian SKA Pathfinder Telescope… operated by the Australian national science agency, CSIRO.
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization believes that it takes a billion years for something like this to reach its maximum size, spanning about 16 times larger than the Milky Way. It has already expanded beyond multiple galaxies.
The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory’s MeerKAT telescope was able to get a better shot.
Researchers have some theories… It’s either the result of an explosion in the galactic center, or jets pushing energetic particles, or as a result of a stellar blast shock wave caused by the formation of new stars.
Ray NorrisD., a professor at Western Sydney University and CSIRO, says “We know that ORCs are rings of faint radio emissions that surround a galaxy with a hyperactive black hole at its center, but we don’t yet know what causes them, or why they occur so rarely.”
So far, only 5 individual radio circuits have been observed, all by telescopes observing through radio wavelengths. Visible, infrared, and X-ray telescopes have yet to document ORCs.