The universe is a chaotic place, filled with exploding stars, matter falling into black holes, and rogue planets wandering around on their own. All this chaos makes astronomers suspicious when they spot a hint of perfection in the cosmos, such as a bubble of matter left over from a star’s death that appears to be perfectly symmetrical.
Recently, astronomers discovered a galactic supernova remnant with amazing circular symmetry, making it one of the most perfectly spherical objects discovered in the universe. Perfection isn’t always a bad thing, but it does raise some questions about how the object came to be.
The discovery, submitted to the Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of Australia and available on the arXiv preprint site, was spotted in images collected by Australia’s Patfinder telescope, which has a square kilometer array. The researchers behind the paper identified the object as the remnant of a galactic supernova, an expanding cloud of debris that forms after the explosive death of a star.
The object, located in the Milky Way Galaxy, was named Teleis, which means “perfect” in Greek. Although it is almost perfectly symmetrical, Taurus is not very bright. It has one of the lowest recorded surface brightness levels of any known supernova remnant. Astronomers observing Teleos are also uncertain about its distance from Earth, estimating that it could be either 7,175 or 25,114 light-years away. This is a huge difference in distance, and this uncertainty affects our understanding of how long the object has been there.
The two different distances imply different sizes of the Telescope, as objects appear smaller the further away they are. At a closer distance to Earth, the supernova remnant would be about 46 light-years across. If it were much farther away, it would be a much larger cloud – about 157 light-years across. Based on variations in its size, scientists speculate that this expanding cloud of matter has either existed for less than 1,000 years in its smaller size or is a much older remnant of a supernova that formed more than 10,000 years ago and grew to its larger size.
Another strange thing about Taurus is that it appears only in radio waves, although modeling of the object suggests that it should have X-ray emissions. The scientists behind the study are trying to explain the lack of X-rays by suggesting that Taurus is a Type Ia supernova, which occurs in a double star system in which one of the stars is a white dwarf. In this case, the zombie star often remains with the supernova remnant. There is a neighboring star that fits this profile, but that would mean that Taurus is much smaller, stretching out in the Milky Way for only 11 light-years. However, none of the distance measurements for Taurus are consistent with such a small size.
“We consider several different scenarios to explain the unusual properties of Taurus, each of which has its own difficulties,” the researchers write in the article. “While we consider the Type Ia scenario to be the most likely, we note that there is no direct evidence to definitively confirm either scenario.”
The researchers suggest that sensitive, high-resolution observations of this object are needed to reveal its mysterious perfect shape and unusual properties.
