Astronomers keep finding enormous rings of radio light in deep space that nothing in the textbooks can account for. Each is more than 50 times the width of the Milky Way, glows only at radio wavelengths — invisible to optical, infrared, and X-ray telescopes — and is brightest around its edges.
They first turned up in 2019 in an Australian radio survey. Researchers worked through the known possibilities — a spherical shock wave from a fast radio burst, a gamma-ray burst, or a neutron-star merger; a supernova remnant; a planetary nebula; even an imaging artifact around a bright source. None fit. The rings, the astronomers reported, match no known object or artifact and probably represent a "new class of astronomical object."
Eight are now confirmed, with possibly six more, and three have a galaxy sitting dead center — a hint that the galaxies themselves may have blown these rings.
