"This could be something completely new." "The other explanation is more exciting," she said. Perhaps in the case of the ORCs, the jets are simply pointing directly towards our planet, Koribalski suggested, so that we are in essence looking down the barrel of a long tube, creating a circular, two-dimensional image around a central galaxy. Astronomers have often spotted such phenomena in the universe, though generally the jets align in such a way with Earth that observatories see them as moving out of the sides of the galaxy. These might simply be too faint to be picked up by current telescopes.Īnother possibility is that the central supermassive black hole of these galaxies is consuming gas and dust, producing humongous, cone-shape jets of particles and energy.
The first is that perhaps there are additional galaxies forming a cluster near the object and bending bright material into a ring-like structure.
The team has now narrowed their ideas down to three potential explanations, Koribalski said. They posted their findings on April 27 to the preprint database arXiv, and they have been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The researchers have since scanned the skies again with ASKAP and found one more ORC to add to their collection, an entity about 1 million light-years across located about 3 billion light-years away.
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