“Punctum” may sound like type of punctuation, but to some scientists, it constitutes what may be a brand new type of cosmic object.<\/p>\n
In a new interview with Gizmodo<\/a>, Elena Shablovinskaya, a\u00a0radio astronomer at Chile’s Universidad Diego Portales (UDP) and Germany’s Max Planck Institute who led the team behind the find, waxed prolific about the bright dot she and her colleagues detected in a nearby galaxy.<\/p>\n As Shablovinskaya explains, she and her\u00a0colleagues at the Atacama Large Millimeter\/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope complex located\u00a0in the Chilean desert\u00a0were looking at the spiral galaxy NGC 4945, located within the Centaurus constellation about 11 million light years away from Earth, when they noticed a strange dot they’d never seen before.<\/p>\n Switching ALMA’s array into polarized light, they saw something astonishing: the spot \u2014 which is indeed what “punctum” means in Latin \u2014 was much, much brighter than everything around it.<\/p>\n “Everything else disappeared,” she told Giz, “even the bright central black hole, and only this little dot remained.”<\/p>\n To be fair, descriptions of Punctum’s incredibly powerful brightness make it easy to see why its light drowned out everything else.<\/p>\n “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, with only the Crab Nebula surpassing it among star-related sources in our galaxy,” the astrophysicist told Space.com in an interview<\/a>.<\/p>\n