Sydney:
Australian researchers have discovered a strange orbiting object in the Milky Way that astronomers say is unlike anything astronomers have ever seen.
First noticed by a university student working on his dissertation, the object emits a massive burst of radio energy three times an hour.
The pulse comes “every 18.18 minutes, like clockwork,” said astrophysicist Natasha Hurley-Walker, who led the study after the student’s discovery, using a telescope in the Western Australian outback known as the Murchison. Widefield Array.
While there are other objects in the universe that go on and off — such as pulsars — Hurley-Walker said 18.18 minutes is a frequency never seen before.
Finding this object was “a bit creepy for an astronomer,” she said, “because nothing in the sky is known to do that.”
The research team is now trying to understand what they found.
Digging through years of data, they were able to establish a few facts: The object is located about 4,000 light-years from Earth, is incredibly bright and has an extremely strong magnetic field.
But there are still many mysteries to unravel.
“If you do all the math, you find that they shouldn’t have enough power to produce these kinds of radio waves every 20 minutes,” Hurley-Walker said.
“It just shouldn’t be possible.”
The object may be something that researchers have theorized may exist, but have never seen an “ultra-long-period magnetar.”
It could also be a white dwarf, a remnant of a collapsed star.
“But that’s also quite unusual. We only know of one white dwarf pulsar, and nothing quite as amazing as this one,” Hurley-Walker said.
“Of course it could be something we’ve never thought of before — it could be an entirely new type of object.”
When asked if the powerful, consistent radio signal could have been sent from space by another life form, Hurley-Walker admitted, “I was worried they were aliens.”
But the research team was able to observe the signal over a wide frequency range.
“That means it has to 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 in the universe.
“More detections will tell astronomers whether this was a rare one-off event or a huge new population that we’d never noticed before,” Hurley-Walker said.
The team’s paper on the object is published in the latest issue of the journal Nature.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)