{"id":401234,"date":"2022-01-29T18:30:01","date_gmt":"2022-01-29T15:30:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/object-found-in-the-milky-way-unlike-anything-astronomers-have-seen\/"},"modified":"2022-01-29T18:30:01","modified_gmt":"2022-01-29T15:30:01","slug":"object-found-in-the-milky-way-unlike-anything-astronomers-have-seen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/object-found-in-the-milky-way-unlike-anything-astronomers-have-seen\/","title":{"rendered":"#Object found in the Milky Way ‘unlike anything astronomers have seen’"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Object found in the Milky Way ‘unlike anything astronomers have seen’<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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\n \"Huge
\n Huge bursts of radio energy emanating from the Milky Way were first observed by a university student.
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Australian researchers have discovered a strange spinning object in the Milky Way they say is unlike anything astronomers have ever seen.<\/p>\n

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The object, first spotted by a university student working on his undergraduate thesis, releases a huge burst of radio energy three times every hour.<\/p>\n

The pulse comes “every 18.18 minutes, like clockwork,” said astrophysicist Natasha Hurley-Walker, who led the investigation after the student’s discovery, using a telescope in the Western Australian outback known as the Murchison Widefield Array. <\/p>\n

While there are other objects in the universe that switch on and off\u2014such as pulsars\u2014Hurley-Walker said 18.18 minutes is a frequency that has never been observed before. <\/p>\n

Finding this object was “kind of spooky for an astronomer,” she said, “because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that.” <\/p>\n

The research team is now working to understand what they have found. <\/p>\n

Trawling back through years of data, they have been able to establish a few facts: the object is about 4,000 light-years from Earth, is incredibly bright and has an extremely strong magnetic field. <\/p>\n

But there are still many mysteries to untangle. <\/p>\n

“If you do all of the mathematics, you find that they shouldn’t have enough power to produce these kind of radio waves every 20 minutes,” Hurley-Walker said. <\/p>\n

“It just shouldn’t be possible.” <\/p>\n

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\n The strange bursts of radio energy were detected using the Murchison Widefield Array telescope in Australia.
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The object may be something researchers have theorized could exist but have never seen called an “ultra-long period magnetar”. <\/p>\n

It could also be a white dwarf, a remnant of a collapsed star. <\/p>\n

“But that’s quite unusual as well. We only know of one white dwarf pulsar, and nothing as great as this,” Hurley-Walker said. <\/p>\n

“Of course, it could be something that we’ve never even thought of\u2014it could be some entirely new type of object.”<\/p>\n

On the question of whether the powerful, consistent radio signal from space could have been sent by some other life form, Hurley-Walker conceded: “I was concerned that it was aliens.” <\/p>\n

But the research team was able to observe the signal across a wide range of frequencies.<\/p>\n

“That means it must be a natural process, this is not an artificial signal,” Hurley-Walker said. <\/p>\n

The next step for the researchers is to look for more of these strange objects across the universe. <\/p>\n

“More detections will tell astronomers whether this was a rare one-off event or a vast new population we’d never noticed before,” Hurley-Walker said. <\/p>\n

The team’s paper on the object has been published in the latest edition of the journal Nature<\/i>.<\/p>\n\n

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Mysterious energy source unlike anything astronomers have seen before\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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\n More information:<\/strong>
\n Natasha Hurley-Walker, A radio transient with unusually slow periodic emission, Nature<\/i> (2022). DOI: 10.1038\/s41586-021-04272-x<\/a>. www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-021-04272-x<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

\n \u00a9 2022 AFP<\/p>\n

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Citation<\/strong>:
\n Object found in the Milky Way ‘unlike anything astronomers have seen’ (2022, January 29)
\n retrieved 30 January 2022
\n from https:\/\/phys.org\/news<\/a>\/2022-01-milky-astronomers.html<\/p>\n

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