Sydney: Australian researchers have found a strange spinning object in the Milky Way they say not as ever seen by astronomers.
Objects, first seen by a university student who worked on undergraduate theses, released a large explosion of radio energy three times every hour.
Credit comes “every 18.18 minutes, like a clockwork,” said Astrophysics Natasha Hurley-Walker, who led the investigation after the discovery of students, using a telescope in the interior of Western Australia known as the Widfield Murchison array.
While there are other objects in the universe that turns on and deadly such as Pulsar Hurley-Walker saying 18.18 minutes is a frequency that has never been observed before.
Finding this object is “spooky type for an astronomer,” he said, “because there is nothing known in the sky that did it.” The research team now works to understand what they have found.
Trawling back through data years, they have been able to build some facts: the object is around 4,000 light years from the earth, very bright and has a very strong magnetic field.
But there are still many mysteries to parse.
“If you do all math, you find that they should not have enough power to produce this kind of radio wave every 20 minutes,” Hurley-Walker said.
“That should be impossible.” The object is probably something handled by the researchers can exist but have never seen called “ultra-long period magnetar”.
It can also be white dwarf, the rest of the star collapsed.
“But it’s also very unusual.
We only know one white dwarf pulsar, and nothing is like this,” Hurley-Walker said.
“Of course, it can be something that we never even thought about it can be a type of object that is completely new.” On the question of whether the radio signal is strong and consistent from space can be sent by several other forms of life, Hurley-Walker conceded: “I am worried that it is alien.” But the research team can observe signals at various frequencies.
“That means it must be a natural process, this is not an artificial signal,” Hurley-Walker said.
The next step for researchers is to look for more than this strange object throughout the universe.
“More detection will tell astronomers whether this is a one-rare event or a new population that we have never considered before,” Hurley-Walker said.
Team papers on objects have been published in the latest edition of the journal Nature.