Astronomer marked the position of the mysterious object in the Milky Way. (Twitter)
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Thu 27 January 2022:
The discovery of a weird spinning object in the Milky Way by Australian researchers is unlike anything astronomers have ever seen.
The item, discovered by a university student working on his undergraduate thesis, emits a massive burst of radio energy three times every hour.
The pulse comes “every 18.18 minutes, like clockwork,” said astrophysicist Natasha Hurley-Walker, who led the investigation after the student’s discovery, using a telescope in the Western Australian outback known as the Murchison Widefield Array.
While there are other phenomena in the universe that flip on and off, such as pulsars, Hurley-Walker claims that 18.18 minutes is a new frequency.
“A team mapping radio waves has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour, and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before,” the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) spread word of the discovery on Twitter on Thursday.
#breaking A team mapping radio waves has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour, & it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before. https://t.co/PSfpzi6oMM @CurtinMedia @CurtinUni @ColourfulCosmos @Nature @PawseyCentre @CSIRO_ATNF pic.twitter.com/uipt9rGgfC
— ICRAR (@ICRAR) January 26, 2022
Finding this object was “kind of spooky for an astronomer,” she said, “because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that.”
The research team is now working to understand what they have found.
They were able to establish a few facts after sifting through years of data: the object is around 4,000 light-years from Earth, is extraordinarily bright, and has an exceptionally strong magnetic field.
However, there are still many mysteries to be solved.
“If you do all of the mathematics, you find that they shouldn’t have enough power to produce these kind of radio waves every 20 minutes,” Hurley-Walker said.
“It just shouldn’t be possible.”
The object may be something researchers have theorised could exist but have never seen called an “ultra-long period magnetar”.
It could also be a white dwarf, a remnant of a collapsed star.
“But that’s quite unusual as well. We only know of one white dwarf pulsar, and nothing as great as this,” Hurley-Walker said.
“Of course, it could be something that we’ve never even thought of — it could be some entirely new type of object.”
Another amazing discovery by an SKA precursor telescope. This time, a team led by @ICRAR-Curtin astronomers used the Murchison Widefield Array to discover a strange spinning object that released giant bursts of energy every 18 minutes. Very cool. 😎https://t.co/o57RVPIRKg pic.twitter.com/DoLnEUw45s
— SKA Australia (@SKA_Australia) January 27, 2022
On the question of whether the powerful, consistent radio signal from space could have been sent by some other life form, Hurley-Walker conceded: “I was concerned that it was aliens.”
But the research team was able to observe the signal across a wide range of frequencies.
“That means it must be a natural process, this is not an artificial signal,” Hurley-Walker said.
The next step for the researchers is to look for more of these strange objects across the universe.
“More detections will tell astronomers whether this was a rare one-off event or a vast new population we’d never noticed before,” Hurley-Walker said.
The team’s research has been published in the weekly scientific journal, Nature.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
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