The universe is full of strange discoveries and this strange spinning object discovered by Australian researchers is just one of the many discoveries that human race has successfully done.
According to this discovery by Australian researchers, a strange spinning object has been found in the Milky Way galaxy. This object releases a huge burst of radio energy three times every hour and was first spotted by a university student working while working on his undergraduate thesis.
As per the astrophysicist Natasha Hurley-Walker, who carried out the investigation post the student’s discovery, the pulse comes “every 18.18 minutes, like clockwork”. She used a telescope in the Western Australian outback known as the Murchison Widefield Array to investigate further.
Speaking about the rarity of the object’s frequency, Hurley Walker said that there are many objects in the universe that switch on and off, but a frequency of 18.18 minutes has never been observed before.
While the research team is still working to understand the nature of the object found, Walker seemed impressed with the recent discovery. Spotting this object was “kind of spooky for an astronomer because there's nothing known in the sky that does that”.
Here are some details that have been spotted after assessing data collected through the years –
- The object is nearlt 4,000 light-years from Earth.
- It is incredibly bright.
- It has an extremely strong magnetic field.
"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”, she added.
Although the object seems like something that researchers may have theorised, they have never seen what’s called an "ultra-long period magnetar".
Many fields about the object remain unknown yet
Based on Walker’s speculations, the object could 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”, she added.
Speaking about the possibility of the existence of another life form that could be the source of the powerful radio signal, Walker said, "I was concerned that it was aliens."
Notably, the research team has confirmed the presence of the signal across a wide range of frequencies, which means it must be a natural process.
There are many fields about this object that remain unexplored and hence the research work on the same subject will continue. According to Walker, "More detections will tell astronomers whether this was a rare one-off event or a vast new population we'd never noticed before”.
