Good morning, Rallypoint, and welcome to the March 30th Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD): "Animation: Odd Radio Circles." And here I thought that orcs only existed in books written by J.R.R. Tolkien. An odd radio circle (ORC) a very large unexplained astronomical object that is only visible at radio wavelengths (e.g. not at visible, infrared or X-ray wavelengths), is highly circular and brighter along its edges. This 26-second video clip animates data collected from the SKA Pathfinder radio array, a radio telescope array located at Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in the Mid West region of Western Australia.
ORCs were first detected in 2019, and so are a relatively new astronomic phenomenon. What forms an ORC? One theory suggests an ORC is formed by the merger of two supermassive black holes a the center of a galaxy (since observed examples of ORCs have a galaxy visible at their point of origin, as seen in the video). A fun puzzle.