--- title: "Radio Astronomers Find Weird Object in Nearby Galaxy That Stands Out Against the Entire Sky" description: "Scientists were surprised when they found a little dot nestled near a nearby galaxy turned out to be something bright, strange, and new." date: "2025-08-19" modified: "2025-08-19" authors: - name: "Noor Al-Sibai" job_title: "Senior Staff Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/nooralsibai" url: "https://futurism.com/space-object-stands-out-brightness" categories: - "Off-World" - "Space" tags: - "alma" - "Astronomy" - "astrophysics" - "polarization" --- # Radio Astronomers Find Weird Object in Nearby Galaxy That Stands Out Against the Entire Sky !["Punctum" may sound like type of punctuation, but to astronomers, it constitutes what may be a brand-new type of cosmic object. ]() *\Image: Getty / Futurism\* "Punctum" may sound like type of punctuation, but to some scientists, it constitutes what may be a brand new type of cosmic object. In a [new interview with *Gizmodo*](), Elena Shablovinskaya, a radio 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. As Shablovinskaya explains, she and her colleagues at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope complex located in the Chilean desert were 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. Switching ALMA's array into polarized light, they saw something astonishing: the spot — which is indeed what "punctum" means in Latin — was much, much brighter than everything around it. "Everything else disappeared," she told *Giz*, "even the bright central black hole, and only this little dot remained." To be fair, descriptions of Punctum's incredibly powerful brightness make it easy to see why its light drowned out everything else. "Punctum is astonishingly bright — 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](). As detailed in a new [paper awaiting publication]() in the journal *Astronomy & Astrophysics*, Shablovinskaya and her colleagues at UDP and a consortium of other institutions in North America and Europe found that the strange splotch was still there two weeks after their initial observations, suggesting it wasn't just a telescope fluke or dying star. Instead, as she told *Giz*, they found something that appeared to be "hiding in plain sight," visible only in the millimeter wavelengths. As the observational graphics from the paper show, Punctum was, when viewed on the right spectrums, far brighter than its surroundings. ![ALMA observational graphics of the galaxy NGC 4945 and the cosmic object Punctum. Left column graphics were taken on October 11, 2023, and right column graphics were taken two weeks later on October 25, 2023. Upper two graphics show polarized intensity with brightness contours, the galaxy's nucleus marked X, and Punctum in the small, square box. The bottom two panels show Punctum's relative brightness as compared to its surroundings. ]() Trying to figure out what they were seeing, Shablovinskaya and her colleagues compared Punctum to "every extreme object we could think of — magnetars, pulsars, star-forming regions, and black hole jets." "Nothing matched," she said. Stranger still, when the team tried to look at it through ALMA's X-ray or radio telescopes, it disappeared, making it all the more mysterious and compelling. Looking forward, Shablovinskaya wants to investigate Punctum's bizarre polarization, which she describes as "basically a fingerprint of the magnetic environment," to see what it may reveal. "If we can measure \[Punctum’s magnetic field\] at more wavelengths or watch how it changes over time," she told *Giz*, "we can start to figure out what powers Punctum and whether it links to known astrophysical objects." In the meantime, the astrophysicist remains thrilled by her team's discovery. "Punctum shows us the universe can still surprise us in places we thought we understood well," Shablovinskaya told the website. "For me, it’s a reminder that astronomy is far from finished; we’re still just beginning to discover the full variety of cosmic objects out there." **More on strange cosmic sightings:** [*There's Something Really Suspicious About the Way This Star Died*]() ## Author At Futurism, I've often been drawn to unpacking the narratives that underlie technological, scientific and medical progress, with a special interest in areas of conflict and ambiguity that end up setting agendas and steering the fates of both elites and the hoi polloi. I'm a committed generalist, but I often find myself returning to work involving NASA and the private space sector, the effects of AI on media and society, and the mechanics of the pharmaceutical industry, with a specific focus on the spread of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. Prior to Futurism, I worked for publications ranging from Media Matters and Truthdig to Raw Story and Bustle. I'm also the author of "Myspace Scene Queens," a 2024 title in Instar Books' acclaimed "Remember the Internet" series. My work at Futurism has been cited by outlets including the New Yorker, Slate, Nieman Lab, the Verge, the MIT Technology Review, the Sunday Times, and the Daily Beast. I grew up in North Carolina, attended the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and now live in Brooklyn, New York. In my free time, I'm an avid reader and music fan; you can probably find me at a local poetry reading, concert, underground rave, or DJ set. I'm the proud parent of an ineffable orange cat named Mee-Mow. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()