A student discovers a powerful bright object in the Milky Way that baffles the scientific community

A group of astrophysicists analyze a strange object in the Milky Way that emits intermittent “huge bursts of energy” every eighteen minutes and that, according to experts, is unlike anything they have seen before. This rotating body about 4,000 light-years away from Earth and which gives off a beam of radiation lasting about a minute, is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky, according to the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). A recreation of the object is shown in the video that accompanies this information.

Although this object discovered with the Murchison Widefield Array telescope, located in a desert area of ​​Western Australia, turns on and off like pulsars or other bodies in the Universe, this it does it “every 18 minutes and 18 seconds, like clockwork”said the leader of this study, Natasha Hurley-Walker.

The astrophysicist from Curtin University in Australia and ICRAR also recalled that this peculiarity “was something completely unexpected. To an astronomer it’s creepy because nothing in the sky is known to do that.“For her part, Gemma Anderson, ICRAR-Curtin astrophysicist and co-author of the study, pointed out that this mysterious object is very bright and smaller than the sun and apparently also has a powerful magnetic field. The other peculiarity of this object ” transient”, a term used in the astronomer community to refer to those celestial bodies that turn on and off in the Universe, is that lights up for about a minute.

The temporal characteristic of this object discovered last year by then-student Tyrone O’Doherty contrasts with slow transients, such as supernovae, and fast transients, such as neutron stars. In the first case, the bodies appear and then disappear after several months, while in the second, they turn on and off in seconds or milliseconds, according to information from ICRAR.

Observations of this strange object coincide with that of an “ultra-long period magnetar” or type of neutron star that rotates slowly and whose existence has been predicted in theory,” explained Hurley-Walker. “But no one expected to directly detect one like this because we did not expect them to be so bright. Somehow it’s converting magnetic energy into radio waves much more efficiently than anything we’ve seen before.”

The ICRAR team is currently monitoring the object to see if it re-ignites, while also searching the archives of the Murchison Widefield Array telescope for similar objects to determine “whether this is a unique and rare event or a vast new population that we’ve never seen before.”