[imagesource: Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker / ICRAR-Curtin]
Just like in the film Don’t Look Up, a doctoral student made an unusual discovery while using a high-powered telescope.
Except scientists and citizens are looking up because instead of being a comet about to threaten our existence on Earth it is something that can teach us more about the universe.
Tyrone O’Doherty made the discovery of a strange spinning object releasing awkward bursts of energy while using the Murchison Widefield Array telescope in the outback of Western Australia at Curtin University.
It is one of the most sensitive radio telescopes on Earth and it managed to show the weird radio source while O’Doherty and others were mapping radio waves across the universe.
VICE reported that the curious radio signal in space was spotted pulsing every 18 minutes and 18 seconds over a period of three months before it disappeared from view – which was odd, to say the least.
The image above shows the Milky Way as viewed from Earth, and the star icon marks the location of the unknown object.
This signal showed “an unusual periodicity” that has not been observed previously, according to Natasha Hurley-Walker, a radio astronomer at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) who is leading the study:
Though the source of the signals is still unknown, the scientists who discovered it think those clockwork pulses may be the rotational signature of an exotic dead star, perhaps a white dwarf or a highly magnetized “magnetar,” located some 4 000 light-years away.
Hurley-Walker said that this celestial lighthouse is actually quite close to us, in “our galactic backyard” and that the unexpected signal is “kind of spooky for an astronomer because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that”.
But no matter what it is, the discovery will help reveal “further insight into the evolutionary extremes surrounding the life and death of massive stars,” the study said, published in the scientific journal Nature.
Researchers said their observations could match up with the definition of an ultra-long period magnetar.
CNN has more:
“It’s a type of slowly spinning neutron star that has been predicted to exist theoretically,” Hurley-Walker said.
“But nobody expected to directly detect one like this because we didn’t expect them to be so bright. Somehow it’s converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we’ve seen before.”
The researchers will continue to monitor the object to see whether it turns back on, with further detections able to explain whether this was a rare one-off event or a vast new population that astronomers never noticed before.
If anything, Hurley-Walker concluded that this experience has taught her “it’s worth trying out looking at the sky in entirely new ways” because you never know what you might find.
