Unusual space object detected
Source: By The Indian Express
A team of radio astronomers in Australia has noticed an unusual space object, about 4,000 light years from earth that sends out strong radio signals at regular intervals of about three times an hour. This periodic burst of energy lasts for about a minute, before the object falls silent again.
“This object was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our observations. That was completely unexpected. It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that,” Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker, an astrophysicist at Australia’s Curtin University, said.
Dr Hurley-Walker led the team of researchers that made the discovery, according to a press statement from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), a joint venture of Curtin University and the University of Western Australia. The object was discovered by Curtin University honours student Tyrone O’Doherty using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in outback Western Australia and a new technique he developed. The finding has been published in the latest issue of Nature journal.
Space objects with this kind of flickering behaviour – caused due to periodic releases of massive amounts of energy – are not unknown. Scientists call these ‘transients’, the press statement said.
“When studying transients, you are watching the death of a massive star or the activity of the remnants it leaves behind,” ICRAR-Curtin astrophysicist and co-author of the study Dr Gemma Anderson explained. “‘Slow transients’ – like supernovae – might appear over the course of a few days and disappear after a few months. ‘Fast transients’ – like a type of neutron stars called pulsar – flash on and off within milliseconds or seconds,” she said.
But the behaviour of the newly found object, turning on for about a minute once every 18 minutes, is something that has never been observed previously. Dr Hurley-Walker said the observations matched a predicted astrophysical object called an ‘ultra-long period magnetar’, but was far “brighter” than expected.
“It’s a type of slowly spinning neutron star that has been predicted to exist theoretically. 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,” she was quoted as saying in the press statement.
