Astronomers observed a mysterious object in the Milky Way that periodically releases a giant burst of energy. The object could be a magnetar, a type of neutron star.
Astrophysicist Natasha Hurley-Walker was scanning radio signals across huge swaths of the cosmos in late 2020 when she and her colleagues stumbled on something they had never seen before.
"It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there's nothing known in the sky that does that," Hurley-Walker, an astronomer at Curtin University and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Australia, said in a statement.
More research is needed to figure out what's causing the bursts of energy, but the astronomers think it could be a so-calledHurley-Walker said the prospect of a repeating radio signal in space may cause some to think it’s a dispatch from aliens, but she said the observations spanned a wide range of frequencies, which indicates that they have a natural origin and aren’t some artificial signal.
To confirm the discovery, Hurley-Walker sifted through the Murchison Widefield Array's extensive archives, which stretch back to 2013, to see whether the telescope had picked up any other activity from the object. She found that it had switched on in the first part of 2018, emitting 71 flashes of radio signals from January to March of that year, before it switched off again. As she and her colleagues saw in their own observations, the pulses came at regular intervals.
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