Listening out for pulsars (Image: David Nunuk/Science Photo Library)
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WE鈥橰E homing in on the blobs from outer space. In the past three decades astronomers have seen dips in the radio signals from quasars and pulsars, seemingly caused by a dark object passing by.
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These events don鈥檛 all look the same, so it isn鈥檛 clear if they share a cause. Sometimes different radio frequencies are delayed by different amounts, while other times the radio signal twinkles.
Now Bill Coles of the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues have seen both time-delays and twinkles from a pulsar at the same time. That suggests the two phenomena may be coming from the same thing 鈥搗iolently turbulent clouds.
鈥淭his is an interstellar cloud way out in the middle of nowhere,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t makes a person wonder 鈥� what the hell is that out there?鈥�
The blobs would fill the distance between the Earth鈥檚 orbit and the sun, which sounds big but is small in interstellar terms.
To affect radio signals as much as they do, the blobs must be filled with plasma that is at least a hundred times denser than normal interstellar space. Coles thinks they might form at pressure points when two regions of the thin dust and gas between stars brush up against each other ().
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淢ystery plasma blobs lurk in deep space鈥�