Astronomers have captured their best image of a mysterious new celestial phenomenon.
CNN reports an image captured by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory's MeerKAT telescope published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society raised new theories about Odd radio circles (ORCs).
Researchers initially believed the circles could be galactic shock waves or throats or wormholes, among other possibilities, but have since narrowed their theories to three: the OCRs are remnants of a huge explosion at the center of a galaxy; they might be powerful jets pumping energetic particles from the galactic center; or they resulted form a starburst shock, CNN reports.
ORCs are objects that were initially discovered in 2020 and have raised questions ever since.
The ORCs were initially spotted by astronomers using the Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope, which is operated by Australia’s national science agency CSIRO, or Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and are reported to measure about a million light-years across, 16 times larger than the Milky Way galaxy that encompasses the Earth and its solar system.
While they still remain a mystery, astronomers believe ORCs take 1 billion years to reach their maximum size and are so massive that they expand through multiple galaxies.
As of Thursday (March 24), only five radio circles have been discovered in space.
You can read more on ORCs and the recent discovery here.