Scientists around the world are puzzled by a recent discovery in a region of the Milky Way, our galaxy. There are two giant ice balls that no one can explain what they are, as they have never seen anything like it in space before.
They are in a distant stretch of the Milky Way and were first detected in 2021. However, it is now that they have been given all the instruments to analyze them thoroughly, to find that they do not resemble anything previously found in space.
A review from Daily Mail reports that these two giant balls emit infrared light, similar to a star. However, no one can explain the huge amount of ice surrounding these two phenomena.
They could be newly formed stars, but the two giant balls are very far from the region where new stars are formed in the Milky Way. In addition to that, the two are very close to each other, which makes the whole matter even more puzzling.
As if that weren't enough, these two balls are the only two detected in their class. So there aren't even other examples to compare.
Where are the ice balls?
For now, they are being referred to as "Object 1" and "Object 2". They are located 30,000 and 43,000 light-years away from Earth. The first image of the ice balls was taken with the Japanese space telescope AKARI. But now, the focus has been shifted to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to obtain a better record of both phenomena.
“We did everything possible to replicate the properties, but currently we cannot find any theory that can explain the properties of spectral energy,” said Dr. Takashi Shimonishi from the University of Niigata, Japan.