They go into a bit more detail about possible explanations here (this is cited in the paper that the article talks about). https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.14805 They talk about your option in 5.11, "Einstein rings." For reasons that I don't understand (but I don't understand anything about optics) they come to the conclusion that the gravitational lens would have to be really large, and it is unlikely that such a large, well-structured lens would exist.
Unexpected Circular Radio Objects at High Galactic Latitude
Ray P. Norris, Huib T. Intema, Anna D. Kapinska
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Baerbel S. Koribalski, Emil Lenc, L. Rudnick, Rami Alsaberi, Craig Anderson, G. E. Anderson, E. Crawford, Roland Crocker, Jayanne English, Miroslav D. Filipovic, Andrew M. Hopkins, Natasha Hurley-Walker, Susumu Inoue, Kieran Luken, Peter Macgregor, Pero Manojlovic, Josh Marvil, Andrew N. O'Brien, Wasim Raja, Devika Shobhana, Tiziana Venturi, Jordan D. Collier, Catherine Hale, Aidan Hotan, Vanessa Moss, Matthew Whiting
2020 · arXiv
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From the abstract
We have found a class of circular radio objects in the Evolutionary Map of the Universe Pilot Survey, using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope. The objects appear in radio images as circular edge-brightened discs, about one arcmin diameter, that are unlike other objects previously reported in the literature. We explore several possible mechanisms that might cause these objects, but none seems to be a compelling explanation.
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paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.14805.pdf > Frequency range: 800 – 1088 MHz > Total integration time: 100 hours but then > We observed ORC 1 and ORCs 2–3 (Project code C3350)with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA)on 9–10 April 2020, at 1.1–3.1 GHz (weighted centralfrequency after the removal of radio frequency inter-ference = 2121 MHz), over a period of 2×12 hours and > ORC-4 was found in archival 325 MHz GMRT data
Maybe better to just read the arxiv article, linked in OP. It's quite readable for a lay-person such as myself, and the meat is quite short. There are pictures starting page 23. https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.14805
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