Circles in space made of radio waves are like nothing we’ve ever seen

By Jason Arunn Murugesu

The ASKAP telescope at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia

CSIRO

Mysterious circles of radio waves found in space have left astronomers scratching their heads, with no idea how they formed, or even how big or far away they are. They don’t seem to match anything that has been seen in space before, so researchers have dubbed them Odd Radio Circles, or ORCs.

Ray Norris at Western Sydney University, Australia, and his colleagues found these unexplained objects using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope, which was completed in 2018. The discovery was made as part of …