Two strange, icy objects in our galaxy that look unlike anything astronomers have ever seen could be an entirely new kind of star.

In 2021, Takashi Shimonishi at Niigata University in Japan and his colleagues spotted what appeared to be two icy balls of gas in roughly the same patch of sky, but separated by a large enough distance to be unrelated to each other.

The objects’ properties were baffling. They looked like…