“dot,” by a team of astronomers led by Elena Shablovinskaia of the Instituto de Estudios Astrofi\u0301sicos at the Universidad Diego Portales in Chile. Shablovinskaia discovered it using ALMA<\/a>, the Atacama Large Millimeter\/submillimeter Array.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n “Outside of the realm of supermassive black holes<\/a>, Punctum is genuinely powerful,\u201d Shablovinskaia told Space.com.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n Astronomers don’t know what it is yet \u2014 only that it is compact, has a surprisingly structured magnetic field, and, at its heart, is an object radiating intense amounts of energy.<\/p>\n “When you put it into context, Punctum is astonishingly bright \u2014 10,000 to 100,000 times more luminous than typical magnetars, around 100 times brighter than microquasars, and 10 to 100 times brighter than nearly every known supernova<\/a>, with only the Crab Nebula<\/a> surpassing it among star<\/a>-related sources in our galaxy<\/a>,” Shablovinskaia said.<\/p>\n Punctum is located in the active galaxy NGC 4945, which is a fairly close neighbor of our Milky Way galaxy<\/a>, located 11 million light-years<\/a> away. That’s just beyond the confines of the Local Group. Yet, despite this proximity, it cannot be seen in optical or X-ray light but rather only millimeter radio wavelengths. This has only deepened the mystery, although the James Webb Space Telescope<\/a> (JWST) has yet to take a look at the object in near- and mid-infrared wavelengths.<\/p>\n What could Punctum be? <\/p>\n Its brightness remained the same over several observations performed in 2023, meaning it is not a flare or some other kind of transitory phenomenon. Millimeter-wave radiation typically comes from cold objects such as young protoplanetary disks<\/a> and interstellar molecular clouds. However, very energetic phenomena such as quasars and pulsars<\/a> can also produce radio waves through synchrotron radiation, wherein charged particles moving at close to the speed of light<\/a> spiral around magnetic field lines and radiate radio waves.<\/p>\n What we do know about Punctum is that based on how strongly polarized its millimeter light is, it must possess a highly structured magnetic field. And so, Shablovinskaia believes what we are seeing from Punctum is synchrotron radiation. Objects with strong polarization tend to be compact objects, because larger objects have messy magnetic fields that wash out any polarization.<\/p>\n Perhaps that synchrotron radiation is being powered by a magnetar,<\/a> the team believes, which is a highly magnetic pulsar<\/a>. However, while a magnetar’s ordered magnetic field fits the bill, magnetars (and regular pulsars for that matter) are much fainter at millimeter wavelengths than Punctum is.<\/p>\n
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