Q: What purpose could Punctum serve? Only the DESIGNER of the cosmos knows....
"It started as a side note in a high-resolution ALMA observation. Elena Shablovinskaia and her team weren’t hunting for the weird. They were mapping the bright, active heart of NGC 4945 — a nearby starburst galaxy 11 million light-years away — when they spotted a faint blip about 60 parsecs off-center.
At 50% ± 14% polarization in millimeter wavelengths, the source — now nicknamed “Punctum” from the Latin for “point” or “dot” — has one of the highest polarization degrees ever seen in an extragalactic compact object. Even stranger, it’s invisible in optical, infrared, X-ray, and lower-frequency radio data. The only window into its existence is ALMA’s millimeter eye.
Astronomers now claim Punctum could represent an entirely new astrophysical object.
Punctum isn’t just bright for its category — it may be its own category. Shablovinskaia’s team measured its millimeter luminosity at roughly 2 × 10³⁵ erg/s, making it 10,000 to 100,000 times more luminous than typical magnetars, 100 times brighter than microquasars, and rivaled only by the Crab Nebula among known stellar remnants.
The leading suspect is synchrotron radiation from an object with a highly ordered magnetic field. That’s the same basic physics behind pulsars, magnetars, supernova remnants, and non-thermal filaments in the Milky Way. But Punctum’s combination of intensity and polarization doesn’t match any of these.
Polarization is basically light with a sense of direction — instead of its electric fields wobbling every which way, they’re all lined up, like cosmic hairs brushed neatly by a magnetic field. In space, that often happens when charged particles spiral around magnetic field lines at near-light speeds, producing synchrotron radiation. The stronger and more orderly the magnetic field, the more coordinated the light’s “dance” becomes — which is why Punctum’s 50% polarization is such a smoking gun for something with an unusually well-organized magnetic environment.
Punctum could be the first detected member of an entirely new class of astrophysical object, one that hides from most of the electromagnetic spectrum and only reveals itself in polarized millimeter light."
"It started as a side note in a high-resolution ALMA observation. Elena Shablovinskaia and her team weren’t hunting for the weird. They were mapping the bright, active heart of NGC 4945 — a nearby starburst galaxy 11 million light-years away — when they spotted a faint blip about 60 parsecs off-center.
Astronomers now claim Punctum could represent an entirely new astrophysical object.
Punctum isn’t just bright for its category — it may be its own category. Shablovinskaia’s team measured its millimeter luminosity at roughly 2 × 10³⁵ erg/s, making it 10,000 to 100,000 times more luminous than typical magnetars, 100 times brighter than microquasars, and rivaled only by the Crab Nebula among known stellar remnants.
The leading suspect is synchrotron radiation from an object with a highly ordered magnetic field. That’s the same basic physics behind pulsars, magnetars, supernova remnants, and non-thermal filaments in the Milky Way. But Punctum’s combination of intensity and polarization doesn’t match any of these.
Polarization is basically light with a sense of direction — instead of its electric fields wobbling every which way, they’re all lined up, like cosmic hairs brushed neatly by a magnetic field. In space, that often happens when charged particles spiral around magnetic field lines at near-light speeds, producing synchrotron radiation. The stronger and more orderly the magnetic field, the more coordinated the light’s “dance” becomes — which is why Punctum’s 50% polarization is such a smoking gun for something with an unusually well-organized magnetic environment.
Punctum could be the first detected member of an entirely new class of astrophysical object, one that hides from most of the electromagnetic spectrum and only reveals itself in polarized millimeter light."
ZME
