Summary
December 17 2020: Article talks about "Ghostly Circles" detected by some observatories over the past year or so. These are large roughly-circular fields of unknown origin, that don't appear in the visible spectrum, but can be detected with radio telescopes. We can tell how far away they are, and therefore can't tell how large they are, but both distances when eventually figured out will no doubt certainly be measured in light years. Several possible sources have been considered, and some ruled out (they feel conclusively it's not instrument error) but it's unclear if they are a massive electron cloud, or an Einstein Ring distortion caused by energy being distorted by the gravity of some invisible dark matter hidden at the center, or remnant of a long-since exploded supernova.
Source
Game and Story Use
- Article provides a few quite lovely images of the circular fields rendered in pretty colors, useful for depicting a negative space wedgie or swirly energy thingy in a science fiction/space opera game.
- Could be a clue or symptom of some sort of intergalactic doomsday weapon or dimensional collapse destroying our reality. If more of these are detected, especially in a trajectory or line pointing right at us, it could be bad.
- Maybe the eyes of Azathoth turning in our direction.
- With a nickname like "ghostly circles", it'd be fun to assign them some sort of supernatural or ghostly properties.
- Apparently they were first discovered in September 2019, but are only hitting the news in late 2020 because the scientists involved wanted to take their time and rule out instrumentation error. This slow progress of scientific review could be repurposed as a sinister sign of a government conspiracy to conceal the truth.