Citizen scientists discover 3 new 'odd radio circles'
A team of citizen scientists from India's RAD@home project just helped discover three new "odd radio circles" (ORCs)—huge, faint rings that only show up in radio waves.
One of these, called RAD J131346.9+500320, sits about seven billion light-years away and is not only the most distant ORC yet, but also the most energetic.
Even cooler: it features a rare pair of giant expanding rings stretching nearly a million light-years across.
ORCs are huge rings of magnetized plasma
ORCs are massive rings of magnetized plasma that can't be seen with regular telescopes or X-rays—only super-sensitive radio arrays like Europe's LOFAR can catch them.
Scientists first spotted ORCs back in 2019, and this new twin-ring system is just the second one ever found.
Some other ORCs happen when jets from supermassive black holes smash into hot plasma inside galaxy clusters.
With next-gen telescopes, we will spot more ORCs
These finds add three more to the previously known eight ORCs—so they might be more common than we thought!
It's a big win for citizen science and human pattern recognition.
Plus, with next-gen telescopes like the Square Kilometre Array coming in the early 2030s, we're likely to spot even more and learn how galaxies and black holes evolve over time.