Space May Be Filled With Plasma 'Noodles'

According to a new report, the Milky Way may be home to so-called plasma lenses that are shaped like noodles, or sometimes like hazelnuts or lasagna sheets. These plasma lenses are invisible, and details about them first started surfacing some three decades ago; researchers found signs of them near quasars. These pockets of plasma have largely remained a mystery, but a recent breakthrough has revealed their shapes.

Plasma lenses are basically "lumps" of plasma clouds that exist within the gas that fills space between the various celestial bodies comprising the Milky Way. Researchers have suspected plasma lenses affect the radio waves coming from quasars, serving as lenses of sort that either focus or defocus the radio waves (strengthening and weakening them).

Though they're massive in size (hundreds of millions of miles long), they're not so easy to find, contributing to the difficulty researchers have had in unraveling the mystery. Thanks to the Australia Telescope Compact Array, however, researchers were able to scan a thousand galactic nuclei for radio wave changes.

They eventually found one and spent a year monitoring it, getting 9,000 frequencies to observe. This lead them to conclude the shape of such lenses are possibly "a flat sheet, edge on" or "a hollow cylinder like a noodle, or ... a spherical shell like a hazelnut."

SOURCE: Space