Scientists have discovered a mysterious object at the heart of our Milky Way that doesn’t fit the definition of anything else in the galaxy

Scientists have discovered a mysterious object at the center of our Milky Way that doesn’t meet the criteria for anything else in the galaxy.

The team found that the object was emitting microwaves, indicating that it contained dust and fast-moving gas that was moving nearly 112,000 miles per hour from a very small area at the heart of our galaxy.

Astronomers considered a number of possibilities for what the object could be, from a black hole to a collapsing cloud to an evolving star, but found that “its features do not closely match those of any known type of astronomical body”.

“At the center of our Galaxy are billions of stars, tens of millions of solar masses of gas, a supermassive black hole, a tenth of our Galaxy’s ongoing star formation, and a vast graveyard of stellar remnants,” the researchers shared in a study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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“It is therefore the most likely place to find new object classes. We present one such object in this work.

The object, designated G0.02467–0.0727, was discovered using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Observatory in Chile.

“We consider several explanations for the Millimeter Ultra-Broad Line Object (MUBLO), including a protostellar outflow, an explosive outflow, a collapsing cloud, an evolving star, a stellar merger, a high-velocity compact cloud, an intermediate-mass black hole, and a background galaxy,” the team wrote.

“Most of these conceptual models are either inconsistent with the data or do not fully explain it.”

The object was observed when the team was using ALMA to study a special region at the center of our galaxy known as the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ).

About 700 light-years across, the CMZ contains nearly 80 percent of all the dense gas in the galaxy and is home to poorly understood giant molecular clouds and massive star clusters.

Astronomers detected millimeter waves emanating from the object, with the surrounding dust showing broad, spread-out signals.

The object also emitted continuous radiation that appeared to come from the dust and emitted specific signals from certain molecules such as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide.

Carbon sulfide has been detected in molecular clouds, and sulfur dioxide has been observed around Io, one of Jupiter’s moons.

The temperature of the gas was around -436 degrees Fahrenheit, much colder than what was usually seen in this part of the galaxy.

The research also found that the gas molecules did not travel in a simple ring, suggesting they could be flowing away from the exploding star, Nature reported.

However, shock waves create specific chemicals that MUBLO lacks.

The researchers said the most likely explanation would be an intermediate-mass black hole or a pair of merging stars shrouded in dust.

But they also noted that the object didn’t fit either definition.

“MUBLO is currently an observationally unique object,” the team concluded in the study.