This light point can be a whole new type of spatial object

At first, the point looked like any other star. Then the astrophysicists went to the polarized light and found themselves looking at an entirely unexpected view.

“Everything else has disappeared, even the shiny central black hole, and only this small point has remained”, ” Elena shablovinskaiaAn astrophysicist in Universidad Diego Portales in Chile and Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, told Gizmodo. The Shablovinskaia team thinks they’ve discovered a whole new type of space object, which they nicknamed “Punctum”.

Like its name, the Latin for “point” or “point”, Punctum is a compact and luminous spot of light in space – but it is only visible to millimeter wavelengths and nourishes an unusually organized magnetic field. An article on Punctum has been accepted for publication in astronomy and astrophysics and is currently available on arxiv.

The team wanted to show that Punctum is simply an unusual example of a known phenomenon, such as a magnetar or a supernova tension. NGC 4945Where Punctum lives, is a neighboring galaxy known for having welcomed an active population of stars babies – it was therefore logical to assume that Punctum was one. After all, NGC 4945 resides so close to the Milky Way that astrophysicists thought they had a solid understanding of the galaxy. We could not have missed something “hiding at sight”, as Shablovinskaia said … Can we?

But the more they tried to force punctum in the established astrophysical wisdom, the more it seemed to challenge it. For example, Punctum has disappeared when the team checked the same region using X-rays or radio-tenscopes, only appearing in the millimeter with the Large millimeter atacama / submillimet (Alma). Alma’s ability to capture polarized light also revealed a strange magnetic field of Punctum to scientists, adding to its mystery.

“So we compared its brightness, polarization and spectrum to all the extreme objects that we could think of – Magnears, Pulsars, stars formation regions and black holes jets,” recalls Shablovinskaia. “Nothing corresponded.”

But accepting that they hit something completely new has no longer raised any questions. What exactly is it? Where Punctum – 10,000 to 100,000 times brighter than Aimtars and 10 to 100 times brighter than most supernovas – get its light? Could it be connected to a black hole or a neutron star?

For Shablovinskaia, the best shooting to find the answer could be to study the strange polarization of Punctum, “essentially a fingerprint of the magnetic environment,” she said. After all, the disturbing alignment of light waves around Punctum alerted the team for the strangeness of the object.

“Usually, when the light is produced in cosmic environments, it comes out mixed and disorderly because the magnetic fields are tangled,” she said. “If we can measure (magnetic field of Punctum) with more wavelengths or look at how it changes over time, we can start to determine which punctum powers and if it connects to known astrophysical objects.”

“Punctum shows us that the universe can always surprise us in places that we thought we understood,” said Shablovinskaia. “For me, it is a reminder that astronomy is far from over; We are barely starting to discover the variety of cosmic objects. ”

The new research marks another good example of Multi-mensest astronomyin which astronomers use different types of signals to study a single source. Recently, Astronomers have found an ultramassive black hole Use of the gravitational lens. In this case, scientists have studied specific behavior of light – polarization – more conventional methods to dismiss their results.