Radio Astronomers Discover Bizarre Object in Close by Galaxy That Stands Out Towards the Total Sky

“Punctum” might sound like sort of punctuation, however to some scientists, it constitutes what could also be a model new sort of cosmic object.

In a new interview with Gizmodo, Elena Shablovinskaya, a radio astronomer at Chile’s Universidad Diego Portales (UDP) and Germany’s Max Planck Institute who led the group behind the discover, waxed prolific concerning the vivid dot she and her colleagues detected in a close-by galaxy.

As Shablovinskaya explains, she and her colleagues on the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope advanced positioned within the Chilean desert have been trying on the spiral galaxy NGC 4945, positioned throughout the Centaurus constellation about 11 million gentle years away from Earth, after they observed an odd dot they’d by no means seen earlier than.

Switching ALMA’s array into polarized gentle, they noticed one thing astonishing: the spot — which is certainly what “punctum” means in Latin — was a lot, a lot brighter than all the pieces round it.

“Everything else disappeared,” she instructed Giz, “even the bright central black hole, and only this little dot remained.”

To be truthful, descriptions of Punctum’s extremely highly effective brightness make it simple to see why its gentle drowned out all the pieces else.

“Punctum is astonishingly bright — 10,000 to 100,000 times more luminous than typical magnetars, around 100 times brighter than microquasars, and 10 to 100 times brighter than nearly every known supernova, with only the Crab Nebula surpassing it among star-related sources in our galaxy,” the astrophysicist told Space.com in an interview.

As detailed in a brand new paper awaiting publication within the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, Shablovinskaya and her colleagues at UDP and a consortium of different establishments in North America and Europe discovered that the unusual splotch was nonetheless there two weeks after their preliminary observations, suggesting it wasn’t only a telescope fluke or dying star.

Instead, as she instructed Giz, they discovered one thing that seemed to be “hiding in plain sight,” seen solely within the millimeter wavelengths. As the observational graphics from the paper present, Punctum was, when seen on the precise spectrums, far brighter than its environment.

Trying to determine what they have been seeing, Shablovinskaya and her colleagues in contrast Punctum to “every extreme object we could think of — magnetars, pulsars, star-forming regions, and black hole jets.”

“Nothing matched,” she stated. Stranger nonetheless, when the group tried to have a look at it by ALMA’s X-ray or radio telescopes, it disappeared, making it all of the extra mysterious and compelling.

Looking ahead, Shablovinskaya needs to research Punctum’s weird polarization, which she describes as “basically a fingerprint of the magnetic environment,” to see what it could reveal.

“If we can measure [Punctum’s magnetic field] at more wavelengths or watch how it changes over time,” she instructed Giz, “we can start to figure out what powers Punctum and whether it links to known astrophysical objects.”

In the meantime, the astrophysicist stays thrilled by her group’s discovery.

“Punctum shows us the universe can still surprise us in places we thought we understood well,” Shablovinskaya instructed the web site. “For me, it’s a reminder that astronomy is far from finished; we’re still just beginning to discover the full variety of cosmic objects out there.”

More on unusual cosmic sightings: There’s Something Really Suspicious About the Way This Star Died