Spooky object found by Australian researchers in the Milky Way is unlike anything astronomers have seen

The team is currently working to understand what they have found.

Sydney:

Australian researchers have discovered a strange spinning object in the Milky Way that they say is unlike anything astronomers have ever seen.

The object, first discovered by a college student working on his university thesis, releases a massive burst of radio energy three times per hour.

Astrophysicist Natasha Hurley-Walker, who led the investigation following the student’s discovery, said the beats “every 18.18 minutes, like the hands of a clock,” said the astrophysicist. writer Natasha Hurley-Walker, who led the investigation following the student’s discovery, using a telescope in the Western Australian outback called the Murchison Widefield Array.

While there are other objects in the universe that turn on and off – such as pulsars – Hurley-Walker says 18.18 minutes is a frequency that has never been observed before.

Finding the object, she said, is “kind of spooky for an astronomer, because nothing known in the sky does.”

The team is currently working to understand what they have found.

Scouring through years of data, they were able to establish a few facts: the object is about 4,000 light-years from Earth, is extremely bright, and has a strong magnetic field.

But there are still many mysteries to untangle.

“If you do all the math, you’ll see that they shouldn’t have enough power to generate these kinds of radio waves every 20 minutes,” says Hurley-Walker.

“It just shouldn’t be possible.”

The object that could be something that researchers have theoretically could exist but have never seen is called an “extremely long-period magnetic field”.

It could also be a white dwarf, the remnant of a collapsed star.

“But that’s also quite unusual. We’ve only known of a white dwarf pulsar and nothing quite like this,” Hurley-Walker said.

“Of course, it could be something we never even thought of – it could be a whole new type of object.”

On the question of whether a strong, consistent radio signal from space could be sent by some other life form, Hurley-Walker admits: “I’m concerned that it’s aliens.”

But the team was able to observe the signal over a wide range of frequencies.

“That means it has to be a natural process, this is not an artificial signal,” Hurley-Walker said.

The researchers’ next step is to look for more of these strange objects across the universe.

“More findings will tell astronomers whether this is a rare event or a massive new population that we haven’t noticed before,” said Hurley-Walker.

The team’s paper on the object was published in the latest edition of the journal Nature.

(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)