This rotating body is about 4,000 light years distant from Earth.
A group of astrophysicists has discovered a strange object in the Milky Way that emits “huge bursts of energy” intermittently 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 emitting a beam of radiation lasting about a minute, is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky, according to a statement from the International Center for Research on Radio Astronomy (ICRAR).
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, it does so “every 18 minutes and 18 seconds, like a clock”, said the leader of this study, Natasha Hurley-Walker.
The astrophysicist at Curtin University in Australia and ICRAR also recalled that this particularity “was something completely unexpected. For an astronomer it was something creepy because nothing is known in the sky that does that.”
For her part, Gemma Anderson, astrophysicist at ICRAR-Curtin 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.
Anderson pointed out that the other peculiarity of this “transient” object, a term used in the astronomer community to refer to those celestial bodies that turn on and off in the Universe, is that it 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.
The observations of this strange object are consistent with that of an ‘ultra-long period magnetar’ or a type of slowly rotating neutron star whose existence has been predicted in theory,” Hurley-Walker explained.
“But no one expected to directly detect one like this because we didn’t expect them to be that bright. Somehow it is 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 rare event.” vast new population that we have never observed before.” (I)
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