A suggestion on the nature of Odd Radio Circles

Astronomers have discovered a totally new phenomenon in the sky. Circles that do not answer to any theory and do not reject any theory.

They don’t know how far-away these rings are. If they’re very far away but still inside our galaxy, they could still be a few light-years across – or they could be far away in the Universe and millions of light-years across.

They are faint rings of radio waves. This is light with a wavelength so long that it falls outside of the light wave spectrum that we can see with unaided eyes. Until now, they haven’t yet been spotted from space.

After they found one, they found half a dozen. And now they imagine that there might be a thousand of them.

Before going public, the scientists were so good to investigate and tell us already which ideas about them are likely incorrect:

Imaging artifact. Unlikely. ORCs have been observed independently.
Radio emission from distant radio galaxies? ORCs are too neat.
Supernova remnants? Too far away to be seen here so large.
Einstein rings? Too symmetrical and no cluster at their center.
Openings to wormholes? These connections have never been sighted.
Never-seen vast shockwaves from some distant galaxy explosion?
The erudite list goes on.

Even after a year, dozens of our smartest are not having a bloody clue.

Propositions are welcome. But they should not only say how these circles come about but also give ways to check such explanations.

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Not inhibited by too much knowledge, here’s my two cents. The fantasy to outsmart with minimal knowledge the smartest is too much fun to forgo.

If I turn out to be right, I want to share in the Nobel Prize with the astronomers who work out the rest of the puzzle. But my explanation makes the circles much ado about nothing, so, probably no Prize anyway.

All these rings face earth. If they were not related to earth, we should also see some of such rings sideways. They have not been seen by any space telescope. However, because the earth’s atmosphere is transparent for radio waves, almost all radio wave observation is done from earth. The Hubble telescope, for instance, cannot ‘see’ radio waves. Space telescopes must be enormous to see weak formations like the ORCs. So, the fact that they haven’t been detected from space does not prove anything too much.

Yet, I want to suggest that this phenomenon we observe is not ‘from out there,’ but a reflection of our planet that projects out there. How so?

When a very powerful light source shoots waves toward earth, then on the sides of our planet (seen from the source’s point of ‘view’), these waves will travel the earth’s 1 km thick atmosphere for many kilometers, and then appear on the other side of our planet as gazing light, forming a ring in the sky, opposite the source that lies at the other side of earth than where we see the ring. All the other wavelengths are filtered out by the long path the rays traveled through our atmosphere, so only radio waves are left. The ‘hole’ in the circle is the earth’s shadow, so to speak.

If every eye and every light-sensitive receptor on earth can see the same star, that means, an enormous amount of radiation is coming our way.

The part of that huge emission that gazes earth will appear on the shadow side (seen from the star) as a ring in the sky.

I propose the hypothesis that every ORC has one of our brighter stars as its source, exactly, on the other side of earth. The ten brightest stars will give the ten clearest ORCs. The weaker ones will give even more vague ones.

My layman’s brain still says: But how can we see rays that go away from us? Maybe we can. How? The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is accepted to be a relic of an early stage of the Universe. But such waves ray away from us, I would say. Apparently not all of them, or we could not detect them. So maybe also here, in vacuum space, part of the radiation running away from us is running toward us? A Quantum effect?

Or, could the ORCs be our striking radar wave light reflected by the Inner or Outer Van Allan Radiation Belt of energetic charged particles?

Anyway, to test my hypothesis, the question to answer is, are the brightest stars we see and the clearest ORCs on each other’s exact opposite side of the earth? A question any astronomer could answer in minutes.

I invested in my ‘solution’ less than three seconds of thinking so, if it’s deemed nonsense or untrue, I’m not insulted or devastated.

That the authors did not see my idea as an option indicates either that I have successfully thought outside the box or that it makes no sense at all.

If you have a better idea, speak up. It’s fun. It’s for free. They call it: WTF.

On 12.11.2020, first day of Chanukah, I posted my initial idea on websites.

If you got disappointed from a lack of astronomical news, look here for an announcement of upcoming news: Japan delights in asteroid soil samples.

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POSTSCRIPT: I wrote the main author on this discovery, Prof. Ray Norris: “May I hope that you will find something worthwhile or amusing in this blog post.” On January 4, 2021 he responded: “Sorry to disappoint you but we now have good evidence these circles are about a billion light years away. Cheers, Ray.” My reaction: “Thank you. I’m happy for you and science.”