Scientists baffled by mystery sphere in space that could provide 'rare' universe insight
An incredible phenomenon in the depths of our galaxy has left scientists baffled. A perfectly spherical object, lying trillions of miles away from Earth but still in our Milky Way galaxy, has dumbfounded experts.
Featuring 'remarkable circular symmetry', the sphere is defying space theories and going against the logic of what scientists thought they knew about the universe. Experts have named the sphere 'Teleios', which means 'complete' or 'perfect' in ancient Greek and refers to its perfect shape.
It was first picked up by Australia's ASKAP telescope and is estimated to measure up to 157 light years wide.
Estimate to be either 7,100 or 25,100 light years from Earth, the researchers' calculations are the equivalent of thousands of trillions of miles.
The technology, named the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), refers to an array of radio telescopes set in the country's Western Australia desert.
Of the sphere, an international team of scientists said: 'The most obvious characteristic of Teleios is its remarkable circular symmetry, coupled with a low surface brightness.'
Writing for The Conversation, they added: 'Teleios [is] named from the Greek Τελεɩοσ ('perfect') for its near-perfectly circular shape.
'This unique object has never been seen in any wavelength, including visible light, demonstrating ASKAP's incredible ability to discover new objects.'
Researchers are not sure exactly what the sphere is composed of, but theories of what it might be include a 'supernova remnant', a term for debris left over after a supernova.
That process is where a star explodes and launches debris and particles into space, which would mean the sphere could be made up of elements including carbon, oxygen, neon and silicon.
The experts said: 'Remarkably, Teleios has retained its symmetrical shape as it aged even to such a diameter.
'The shape indicates Teleios has remained relatively untouched by its environment. This presents us with an opportunity to make inferences about the initial supernova explosion, providing rare insight into one of the most energetic events in the universe.'
They said it could also be a stellar-wind bubble – a large cavity of gas launched by the upper atmosphere of a star.
However, the scientists warned that the sphere needs more investigation before the sphere's nature can be confirmed.
READ SOURCE
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
The Dreadful Policies Halting Archeological Discoveries
Thanks to the creative application of new technologies, the 2020s are quietly shaping up to be a golden age of archaeology. In 2023, then-21-year-old Luke Farritor (now with the Department of Government Efficiency) combined machine‑learning pattern recognition with high‑resolution CT scans to decipher the first word from the Herculaneum scrolls—a Roman library charred by Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Fully decrypting the library could ultimately double the surviving corpus of Ancient Greek and Roman literature—an unprecedented bonanza for classical scholarship. Analysis of ancient DNA has resolved long-debated questions about human migrations. After sequencing hundreds of Bronze Age human genomes, David Reich's research team at Harvard positively identified southwest Russia as the geographical origin of the Indo-European languages, while other genomic work has dated Homo sapiens-Neanderthal interbreeding to 47,000 years ago, several millennia prior to earlier best guesses. Fossilized human footprints in White Sands, New Mexico, have been conclusively dated to about 23,000 years ago—proof that people were in North America during the last Ice Age and forcing scholars to rethink when and how humans first crossed into the New World. Lidar has recently revealed massive ancient cities under jungle canopies, from the Mayan platform of Aguada Fénix in Mexico—larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza—to mysterious urban centers in the ancient Amazon. These developments—whether driven by artificial intelligence, the decryption of ancient genomics, or airborne lasers—promise to momentously expand society's understanding of humanity's past. Notably absent from this bounty, however, are the fruits of traditional, physical, Indiana Jones-style archaeology. The world of bits, as has often been the case these days, is leaving the world of atoms in the dust. While the storied bits over atoms problem is a complicated one, legal mechanisms are straightforwardly to blame for throttling archeological discovery. The case of Italian antiquities policy is paradigmatic. Since the 1930s, Italy—along with Greece, Turkey, and Egypt—has vested ownership of all antiquities in the state. Commerce in freshly unearthed artifacts is outlawed, and unauthorized excavation is punishable by hefty fines and sometimes prison time. Even using a metal detector requires a permit. Edward Luttwak, a historian and author of The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, explains that in Italy, "if you find something, you report it to the authorities. The authorities take it, goodbye. Most often, what they take from you, they put in a depot, a basement, a warehouse, and it never even gets shown." This is the unfortunate lot of the fortunate discoverer of an Italian artifact. Report a Roman coin? It'll be confiscated. Find an Etruscan urn while planting olives? Your land will be turned into an archaeological site the government may never have time to excavate. It's unsurprising, then, that Italians frequently don't report their findings to the government. Many artifacts end up on the black market (in 2023, Italy's Carabinieri Art Squad seized nearly 70,000 illegally excavated artifacts), or are even simply destroyed or hidden away. Private hoarding is an especially pernicious problem: When "illegally excavated" (read: most) Italian artifacts are privately held in people's houses, they are lost both to scholarship and public view. "You could fill twice the museums that exist in Italy from what people have hidden in their houses," says Luttwak, "which they wouldn't hide if you could report [them] to the authorities like they do in England." The British model provides a striking contrast. Since the 1996 Treasure Act, British law has required that significant archaeological finds be reported. Instead of simply seizing them, if the state wishes to retain an item, it must compensate the finder and landowner at its full market value. To capture the far larger universe of objects that fall outside the law's narrow legal definition of "treasure," the state-sponsored Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) established a voluntary nationwide program through which average Britons can log any find, whether or not the state intends to acquire it, into an open scientific database. As of 2020, over 1 million objects have been logged in PAS. According to Michael Lewis, head of Portable Antiquities and Treasure at the British Museum, over 90 percent of PAS-recorded items are found by metal detectorists on cultivated land, indicating how the scheme has turned what was once seen as a threat into a fountainhead of archaeological data. Thanks to these policies, Britain has been increasingly outpacing Italy in Roman archaeology despite its relatively modest classical history, as seen in this viral map of the provenance of hoards of Roman coins. Notice the sheer quantity of Roman coin discoveries reported in the U.K., far surpassing those in Italy. This disparity isn't explained by Roman Britain being richer than Roman Italy (quite the opposite), but by modern Britain recognizing and leveraging incentives to bring history out of occultation. The Great Stagnation of physical archaeology is a choice. The failure of policymakers to get the basics right—to make physical archaeology worth anyone's time—renders the richest landscapes fallow. Luttwak's attention is on one such landscape: the confluence of the Busento and Crati rivers on the edge of Cosenza, Calabria. Contemporary accounts record that in 410 A.D. the Visigoth chieftain Alaric—fresh from sacking Rome—was buried beneath the temporarily diverted river along with the treasures of the Eternal City. "Alaric's treasure is located in the southern part of the city of Cosenza," says Luttwak. "It was documented by an eyewitness." Alaric took "gold and silver objects…statues, and all kinds of things—possibly even the Temple menorah….When Alaric died in Cosenza, he got as the king one third of the treasure [to be] buried with him." "It could be found," explains Luttwak, "with hovering metal detectors, because he was buried with his weapons, too." Alaric's hoard—and maybe Judaism's most iconic physical symbol—should be discoverable today with an aerial anomaly survey and some clever hydraulics. The technology is ready; the incentives are not. Change the rules, and the payoff could be extraordinary. The post The Dreadful Policies Halting Archeological Discoveries appeared first on
UPI
3 days ago
- UPI
La Nina's role explained in Atlantic hurricane season
1 of 3 | Large parts of New Orleans were flooded weeks after several levees failed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005. That hurricane occurred around the onset of La Niña conditions. File Photo by Bob McMillan/FEMA Photo for UPI | License Photo Most people associate La Niña with warmer winters or drought in the southern United States, but its influence stretches far beyond the winter months. When La Niña sets in during hurricane season, it has the potential to dramatically increase both the number and strength of tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic basin. La Niña is part of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle and is defined by lower-than-average sea-surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean near the equator. Although the phenomenon originates far from the Atlantic Ocean, it disrupts global weather patterns in a way that suppresses wind shear across much of the tropical Atlantic. This matters because vertical wind shear -- the change in wind speed or direction with height - tends to prevent tropical systems from organizing. When shear is reduced, clusters of showers and thunderstorms are more likely to organize, strengthen and turn into tropical storms and hurricanes. "La Niña increases the number of hurricanes that develop and allows stronger hurricanes to form," said AccuWeather Lead Hurricane Expert Alex DaSilva. "It also raises the chances for the continental U.S. and the Caribbean Islands to experience a hurricane." During La Niña years, meteorologists often observe more named storms, more major hurricanes and higher accumulated cyclone energy (ACE), a measure of the strength and duration of storms over time. The odds of U.S. landfalls also increase, particularly for the Gulf Coast and Southeast. Two of the most active hurricane seasons in modern history occurred around the onset of La Niña conditions: 2005 and 2020. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, and the official storm naming list was exhausted for the first time, prompting the use of Greek letters. In 2020, the Atlantic basin experienced a record-breaking 11 storms that made direct landfall on U.S. soil, including Hurricane Laura. As for 2025, La Niña is not expected during the early part of the hurricane season. However, forecasters are watching for signs that it could emerge later in the year. "If we trend toward La Niña late in the hurricane season, we could see an active end to the season, similar to what we saw last year," DaSilva said. Complicating matters is the presence of unusually warm water in the Atlantic Ocean, which increases the risk of rapid intensification -- a dangerous trend in which storms gain strength quickly just before landfall. One of the biggest factors for tropical development in 2025 is the abundance of warm water available to fuel storms. "The water temperatures across most of the Atlantic are above average for this time of the year," DaSilva said. "They're not quite as warm as what we saw last year and in 2023, but they're still well, well above average." If La Niña arrives in the second half of the season and combines with this ocean heat, the Atlantic could be primed for a particularly volatile stretch during the peak hurricane months of September through November. La Niña doesn't guarantee an above-average season, but it dramatically shifts the odds in that direction. And for coastal communities, that makes understanding its influence more important than ever.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
La Niña's role in Atlantic hurricane season
Most people associate La Niña with warmer winters or drought in the southern United States, but its influence stretches far beyond the winter months. When La Niña sets in during hurricane season, it has the potential to dramatically increase both the number and strength of tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic basin. La Niña is part of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle and is defined by lower-than-average sea-surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean near the equator. Although the phenomenon originates far from the Atlantic Ocean, it disrupts global weather patterns in a way that suppresses wind shear across much of the tropical Atlantic. This matters because vertical wind shear - the change in wind speed or direction with height - tends to prevent tropical systems from organizing. When shear is reduced, clusters of showers and thunderstorms are more likely to organize, strengthen and turn into tropical storms and hurricanes. "La Niña increases the number of hurricanes that develop and allows stronger hurricanes to form," said AccuWeather Lead Hurricane Expert Alex DaSilva. "It also raises the chances for the continental U.S. and the Caribbean Islands to experience a hurricane." During La Niña years, meteorologists often observe more named storms, more major hurricanes and higher accumulated cyclone energy (ACE), a measure of the strength and duration of storms over time. The odds of U.S. landfalls also increase, particularly for the Gulf Coast and Southeast. Two of the most active hurricane seasons in modern history occurred around the onset of La Niña conditions: 2005 and 2020. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, and the official storm naming list was exhausted for the first time, prompting the use of Greek letters. In 2020, the Atlantic basin experienced a record-breaking 11 storms that made direct landfall on U.S. soil, including Hurricane Laura. As for 2025, La Niña is not expected during the early part of the hurricane season. However, forecasters are watching for signs that it could emerge later in the year. "If we trend toward La Niña late in the hurricane season, we could see an active end to the season, similar to what we saw last year," DaSilva said. Complicating matters is the presence of unusually warm water in the Atlantic Ocean, which increases the risk of rapid intensification - a dangerous trend where storms gain strength quickly just before landfall. One of the biggest factors for tropical development in 2025 is the abundance of warm water available to fuel storms. "The water temperatures across most of the Atlantic are above average for this time of the year," DaSilva said. "They're not quite as warm as what we saw last year and in 2023, but they're still well, well above average." If La Niña arrives in the second half of the season and combines with this ocean heat, the Atlantic could be primed for a particularly volatile stretch during the peak hurricane months of September through November. La Niña doesn't guarantee an above-average season, but it dramatically shifts the odds in that direction. And for coastal communities, that makes understanding its influence more important than ever.
