A still from an animation of the lensing effect produced by the structures. Keith Bannister/Artem Tuntsoy Astronomers think they may have found giant “invisible” structures lurking in the Milky Way.

These things seem to be pretty big – roughly the size of Earth’s orbit around the Sun – and they could help to explain where a bunch of missing matter in the universe is, known as the missing baryon problem.

The detection of these structures was made by astronomers working at the CSIRO’s Compact Array telescope in eastern Australia.

Although previous research had hinted at their presence before, this new paper – published in the journal Science – helps to constrain their size and shape a bit better.

Don’t think these are big, solid objects though. Essentially, the structures appear to be large clumps of some sort of material, possibly clouds of cool gas, in the existing thin gas that lies between stars. And they appear to be in odd shapes.

The astronomers described them as looking like hollow “noodles” or hazelnuts – with material on the outside and a hollow center. Some may even be sheet-like, and we could be looking at them edge-on.

Where they came from, how old they are, or how many there could be in our galaxy remains a mystery, though. “It’s all guesswork at this stage,” lead author Keith Bannister of CSIRO told IFLScience. “There could be many thousands of these in the galaxy.”

The CSIRO's Compact Array in Australia, shown, was used to make the discovery. Alex Cherney

Astronomers think they may have found giant “invisible” structures lurking in the Milky Way. These things seem to be pretty big – roughly the size of Earth’s orbit around the Sun – and they could help to explain where a bunch of missing matter in the universe is, known as the missing baryon problem.

The detection of these structures was made by astronomers working at the CSIRO’s Compact Array telescope in eastern Australia. Although previous research had hinted at their presence before, this new paper – published in the journal Science – helps to constrain their size and shape a bit better.

Don’t think these are big, solid objects though. Essentially, the structures appear to be large clumps of some sort of material, possibly clouds of cool gas, in the existing thin gas that lies between stars. And they appear to be in odd shapes. The astronomers described them as looking like hollow “noodles” or hazelnuts – with material on the outside and a hollow center. Some may even be sheet-like, and we could be looking at them edge-on.

Where they came from, how old they are, or how many there could be in our galaxy remains a mystery, though. “It’s all guesswork at this stage,” lead author Keith Bannister of CSIRO told IFLScience. “There could be many thousands of these in the galaxy.”