The platypus is one of evolution’s lovable, oddball animals. The creature seems to defy well-understood rules of biology by combining physical traits in a bizarre way. They’re egg-laying mammals with duck bills and beaver-like tails, and the males have venomous spurs on their hind feet. In that regard, it’s only fitting that astronomers describe some newly discovered oddball objects as “Astronomy’s Platypus.”

The discovery consists of nine galaxies that also have unusual properties and seem to defy categorization. The findings were recently presented at the 247th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix. The results are also in new research titled “A New Population of Point-like, Narrow-line Objects Revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope,” posted to the arXiv preprint server. The lead author is Haojing Yan from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

“We report a new population of objects discovered using the data from the James Webb Space Telescope, which are characterized by their point-like morphology and narrow permitted emission lines,” the authors write in their research. “Due to the limitation of the current data, the exact nature of this new population is still uncertain.”