Strange icy spheres have been found in space, representing a completely new type of star (photo included).

In 2021, astronomers discovered two peculiar icy objects in our Milky Way galaxy that are unlike anything scientists have seen before. They believe these may represent a completely new type of star. This research was published on the arXiv preprint server, as reported by New Scientist.

Four years ago, Japanese astronomers found what appeared to be two icy gas spheres while analyzing data from the AKARI space telescope, which scanned the Milky Way in infrared light from 2006 to 2011. These objects are located in roughly the same region of space, although they are separated by a significant distance, indicating they are not related.

The two objects exhibit very unusual properties. They resemble dense clouds of interstellar gas or some type of young star. However, both objects are far from clusters of interstellar gas clouds and regions of new star formation, complicating the understanding of how they were formed.

The AKARI telescope lacked the power to accurately determine the nature of these strange objects in deep space based on its data.

Now, astronomers have conducted new observations of these icy spheres using the powerful ALMA radio telescope. Yet, the icy objects still do not resemble anything astronomers have encountered previously. None of the existing theories can explain their properties.

New observations indicate that the two objects must be relatively small compared to other clouds of interstellar gas and are composed of carbon oxide and silicon oxide.

The high concentration of these compounds is typically associated with material ejected by a newborn star, but the small sizes of the objects, their location far from star-forming regions, and the abundance of ice do not align with known types of stars.

According to scientists, these two objects exhibit contradictory characteristics, as they are cold enough to contain a significant amount of ice, yet they also emit infrared radiation like stars.

Astronomers speculate that these objects could represent a completely new type of star that remains unknown to scientists. However, they first need to understand the nature of each of the two icy spheres, as it is currently unclear how similar they are to one another.

At the same time, researchers are surprised that they have only discovered two such objects that are relatively close to each other in cosmic terms, despite the considerable distance between them. Therefore, scientists plan to use the Webb Space Telescope to study these objects more thoroughly and attempt to find more of such objects.