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The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) interferometer has detected a strange object that looks like only emit microwaves near the center of the Milky Way.
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Now, a new study compares this object to known celestial objects in this chaotic region of deep space. Then the scientists behind the study found that none of the descriptions of the known objects perfectly matched this new object.
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While the authors hypothesize that the object could be a remnant of a stellar merger or an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH), future studies in the millimeter and mid-infrared bands will be needed to definitively identify this currently unknown phenomenon.
The universe is a big place.
But despite our tiny size among the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way (which alone is among the hundreds of billions of galaxies), scientists have slowly put together a long list of all the strange things we might encounter in the entire universe. Sometimes, though, a collection of orbiting space telescopes, ground fields, and interplanetary spacecraft stumble upon something that’s a bit off.
Meet the latest – the millimeter ultra-wide object, or MUBLO for short.
Identified in a new paper published last week in Astrophysical Journal Lettersthe object in question lies near the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which scientists describe as containing “tens of millions of solar masses of gas, a supermassive black hole, a tenth of the ongoing star formation in our Galaxy, and a vast graveyard of stellar debris.”
Although it is a cosmic mess, it is among this interstellar chaos that new celestial objects will be discovered and Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array The interferometer (ALMA) is one of the most powerful tools in humanity’s arsenal for stargazing. This array of 66 radio telescopes (as its name suggests) can analyze electromagnetic radiation emanating from space at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths.
Looking to the center of our galaxy, researchers came across a compact source subsequently labeled “G0.02467–0.0727”, otherwise known as MUBLO. MUBLO, made of cold dust and fast-moving gas, also exhibited another strange behavior—it only emitted microwave radiation. Adam Ginsburglead author of the paper, and his team went through a long list of celestial explanations and came up short.
“We are considering several explanations [MUBLO]including a protostellar outflow, an explosive outflow, a collapsing cloud, an evolving star, a merging star, a high-velocity compact cloud, an intermediate-mass black hole, and a background galaxy,” the paper says. “Most of these conceptual models are either inconsistent with the data or do not fully explain it. MUBLO is currently a unique object from the point of view of observation.
According to NatureThe gas molecules also do not travel in a simple ring, which could indicate that they were blown away by a stellar explosion. But MUBLO lacks certain chemicals that would be telltale signs of such an event.
Among the various celestial phenomena examined in the paper, the authors point to two such could explain MUBLO – stellar fusion or intermediate mass black hole (IMHO). However, neither of these hypotheses is perfect. While the idea of ​​a stellar merger is compelling, MUBLO has “a dust mass significantly greater, by more than an order of magnitude, than has been observed in any other merger remnant”. As for the proposal IMHO, it “does not explain all the observed features of MUBLO”.
To understand this new phenomenon – or perhaps a well-disguised known object – uturian millimeter and mid-infrared studies will need to analyze MUBLO and discern previously unseen features that will hopefully indicate what it is.
For now, add another galactic mystery to the list.
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