Australian researchers have discovered a strange spinning object in the Milky Way that they say is unlike anything astronomers have ever seen.
The object, first spotted by a university student working on his undergraduate thesis, was releasing a huge burst of radio energy three times every hour.
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.
Photo: AFP / ICRAR / Curtin / Natasha Hurley-Walker
While there are other objects in the universe that switch on and off — such as pulsars — Hurley-Walker said 18.18 minutes is a frequency that has never been observed before.
Finding this object was “kind of spooky for an astronomer,” she said, “because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that.”
The research team is working to understand what they have found. 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.
However, there are still many mysteries to untangle.
“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.”
The object might be something researchers have theorized could exist, 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. “Of course, it could be something that we’ve never even thought of — it could be some entirely new type of object.”
On the question of whether the powerful, consistent radio signal from space could have been sent by some other life-form, Hurley-Walker said: “I was concerned that it was aliens.”
However, the research team was able to observe the signal across a wide range of frequencies.
“That means it must be a natural process, this is not an artificial signal,” she said.
The next step for the researchers is to look for more of these strange objects across the universe.
“More detections will tell astronomers whether this was a rare one-off event or a vast new population we had never noticed before,” Hurley-Walker said.
The team’s paper was published in the journal Nature.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the