Things always feel at least a little suspicious when they’re too perfect. When something is too correct, it starts to feel unnatural. Like it was manufactured.
This is not only true in life on Earth, but with life in space, as a team of astronomers recently found a supernova out there in the vastness of space that is very round. Like, suspiciously round.
Discovered by astronomers using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, Teleios is the ghost of a dead star, or what scientists call a supernova remnant. But unlike its typically chaotic cousins, Teleios is a nearly perfect sphere.
So perfect, in fact, that the scientists named it after the Greek word for “perfect.” But it is that very circular perfection that’s making scientists a little uneasy. Things that are that perfect in design usually don’t happen by accident. Sometimes, most times, it was intentional.
Putting aside the larger, unanswerable aspects of all this and focusing solely on the practical nature of its circular perfection, that perfection in shape comes at a cost. For one, Teleios is so dim that it has one of the lowest recorded surface brightness levels of any known supernova remnant.
We also can’t figure out how far away it is. Estimates range wildly. Maybe it’s 7,000 light-years away, maybe it’s more than 25,000? That kind of uncertainty makes pinning down its age or size nearly impossible. Depending on where it is, Teleios could be a relatively fresh explosion under 1,000 years old, or a very chill 10,000-year-old cloud of ancient star guts.
Also, it only shows up in radio wavelengths. No X-rays, which is, again, weird. This whole thing is weird. Standard models say we should be seeing some X-ray activity. This spectral absence has led researchers to suspect that Teleios is a Type Ia supernova, one involving a white dwarf that stole too much material from its binary partner and exploded.
These scenarios usually leave behind a “zombie star,” and there is one candidate star nearby. But if that’s the source, Teleios would be way smaller than any current estimate allows. So…maybe not? Again, weird.
Astronomers have no definitive answers. We just know that there’s a nearly perfect sphere floating out in the universe some distance away from us. In their published paper detailing their findings, the researchers say, “We consider several different scenarios to explain Teleios’s unusual properties, all of which have their challenges,” which is just the professional scientist’s way of saying “guys, this thing is weird as hell.”
The post Astronomers Found a Suspiciously Round Object in Our Galaxy appeared first on VICE.
