The universe is a chaotic place filled with explosive stars, and materials fall into black holes and rogue planets wander on their own. All this chaos makes astronomers suspicious when they glimpse the perfect taste in the universe, like the material foam left by the death of a star, seemingly completely symmetrical.
Astronomers recently discovered the remnants of the Milky Way supernova with excellent circular symmetry, making it one of the most perfect spherical objects detected in the universe. Perfection isn't always a bad question, but it does raise some questions about how objects become this way.
The discovery is submitted to Publications of the Australian Astronomy Society and available on the preprint website Arxiv and found in images collected by Pathfinders in Australia Square Kilometer Array. The researchers behind the paper identified the object as a residue of the Milky Way supernova, an expanded fragment that formed after the star exploded and died.
Located in the Milky Way, the object is called Teleios, which is the perfect word in Greek. Although it's almost completely symmetrical, Teleios isn't very bright. It has one of the lowest levels of surface brightness recorded in supernova residues. Astronomers who observe Teleios are also not sure about its distance from Earth, estimates that it may be 7,175 or 25,114 light years away. This is a huge difference in distance, and uncertainty affects our understanding of how long the object has been used.
These two different distances mean that Teleios are of different sizes because objects appear smaller and farther away. At a very close distance from the Earth, the supernova residue will be about 46 light years. If it was far away, it would be a bigger cloud – spread over 157 light-years. Based on its size changes, scientists believe that the cloud of this particular expansion material is smaller in size, or smaller supernova residue, formed more than 10,000 years ago and grew to larger sizes.
Another strange thing about Teleios is that it only appears in radio wavelengths, even though the modeling of the object indicates that it should have X-ray emissions. The scientists behind the study tried to explain the lack of X-ray emissions by suggesting that Teleios is a type IA supernova, which was conducted in a binary star system, where one of the stars is a white dwarf. In this case, zombie stars usually stay behind along with supernova residue. There is a star suitable for profile nearby, but that means Teleios is much smaller, spanning 11 light-years in the way of the Milky Way. However, the measurement of the distance of Teleios does not correspond to this small size.
“We considered several different scenarios to explain the abnormal properties of Teleios, all of which face challenges,” the researchers wrote in this article. “Although we thought the IA scheme was most likely, we noticed that there was no direct evidence to identify any situation.”
The researchers believe that sensitive and high-resolution observations of this object are needed to reveal its mysterious perfect shape and abnormal qualities.
