Odd radio circles are glowing around some galaxies. Now we know why.
Odd radio circles are glowing around some galaxies. Now we know why.
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These were a completely new astronomical phenomenon never before observed: rings of light in the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum from an unknown source.
At the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii, a team of researchers looked at ORC 4 and noticed something else strange: Along with the galaxy at the ring's center was a large amount of heated, compressed gas.
One postdoctoral researcher on the team, Cassi Lochhaas, ran a series of computer simulations replicating the size and properties of ORC 4 – including the shocked gas they saw in the galaxy's center.
These simulations showed outflowing galactic winds that had been blowing for hundreds of millions of years out of that center, triggered by that big starburst shockwave.
Coil and her team realized that ORC 4 was yet another product of this starburst galaxy – a visible result of the multi-star explosions that push out shocked gas and outflowing winds.
ORC 4 isn't the only radio circle pulsing through space, but Coil and others hope to study these rings and get more answers to what causes them and what they might reveal about how galaxies evolve over billions of years.
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