Australian researchers have discovered something which astronomers had so far never seen, a strange spinning object caught their eye from the Milky Way galaxy.
The object was first spotted by a university student working on his undergraduate thesis. Later, it was astrophysicist Natasha Hurley-Walker, who led the investigation using a telescope in the Western Australian outback known as the Murchison Widefield Array. She said, "The pulse comes "every 18.18 minutes, like clockwork."
The astrophysicist found the matter to be "kind of spooky," as she said she mentioned the reason being there's nothing known in the sky that does those regular interval signals. She added, ""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. "It just shouldn't be possible."
According to research, 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. But there are still many mysteries to untangle.
The object may be something researchers have theorised could exist but have never seen called an "ultra-long period magnetar". It could also be a white dwarf, a remnant of a collapsed star. "But that's quite unusual as well. We only know of one white dwarf pulsar, and nothing as great as this," Hurley-Walker said.
The team's paper on the object has been published in the latest edition of the journal 'Nature'. "The fluence of the pulses is variable but broadly follows a distribution with two ‘on’ intervals approximately 30 days wide (3 January–2 February and 28 February–28 March 2018; see Fig.2), with fast rise times, slow decay times and a 26-day null interval between them," read the research article.
