Unlike Anything Astronomers Have Ever Seen Before
A team mapping radio waves in the Universe 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 team who discovered it think it could be a neutron star or a white dwarf—collapsed cores of stars—with an ultra-powerful magnetic field.
Spinning around in space, the strange object sends out a beam of radiation that crosses our line of sight, and for a minute in every twenty, is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky.
An animation describing the discovery, the behavior of the object and what it might look like. Credit: ICRAR.
Astrophysicist Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker, from the Curtin University node of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research, led the team that made the discovery.
“This object was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our observations,” she said.
“That was completely unexpected. It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that.
“And it’s really quite close to us—about 4000 light years away. It’s in our galactic backyard.”
