Scientists are trying to solve the mystery of mysterious radio circuits in space

In 2019, Western Sydney University School of Science professor Ray Norris and colleagues discovered mysterious glowing rings in the sky using the ASKAP Wireless Telescope in Western Australia. The rings were different from everything scientists had previously seen, and they had no idea what they were.

Norris said, in an article published by the site “The Conversion” Monday: “We call them ORIs, or ORCs. It still baffles us, but new data from the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa helps us solve the mystery.”

The circles are most likely the result of massive explosions of hot gas emanating from the center of the galaxy. Scientists have captured images of one of these rings using MeerKAT that show amazing details of this astronomical phenomenon, such as a small dot of radio emission in the middle of the ring.

“We now think that these rings surround distant galaxies about a billion light-years away, which means that the rings are enormous, about a million light-years wide,” Norris explained.

The rings appear to be the edges of a spherical shell surrounding the galaxy, like a wave from a giant explosion, and are brighter at the edges, as more material is concentrated along the line of sight, like a soap bubble.

The telescope detected a magnetic field running along the edge of the sphere. This suggests that an explosion in the central galaxy caused a hot blast to collide with weak, extragalactic gas. The resulting shock wave then activated the electrons in the gas, causing them to orbit the magnetic field, generating radio waves.