Mysterious object never seen before in our galaxy has been discovered - and it's blasting out signals

Scientists have discovered a mysterious cosmic object that has never been observed in our galaxy before.

Astronomers have detected objects that emit powerful bursts of energy a few times an hour before falling silent.

These strange occurrences have been referred to as “long-period radio transients”, or LPTs and their source has puzzled experts although it was believed they were caused by dead stars.

However an LPT that was just discovered now challenges what was known about how these mysterious objects came to be. This one is even more strange than previous discoveries because it also sends out X-ray pulses.

ASKAP J1832-0911Ziteng (Andy) Wang, ICRAR

An international team of researchers, led by Curtin University astronomer Ziteng Andy Wang, detected “an extremely bright source” named ASKAP J1832-0911 which sent out radio waves every 44 minutes. It is located 15,000 light-years away in a region of the Milky Way filled with dust, gas and stars.

The team had a stroke of luck when they discovered two previous observations in data captured by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This led to the discovery of “clear X-ray signals coming from ASKAP J18332” that also followed the same 44-minute cycle as the radio pulses, Wang explained in an article for The Conversation.

More observations are needed to understand what ASKAP J1832-0911 truly is. Dead stars with very strong magnetic fields, like neutron stars (which are heavy) and white dwarfs (which are lighter), often give off both radio and X-ray bursts. However, this object does not fit into any known category. The object could be a highly magnetised dead star, or something unknown.

The research was published 28 May in the journal Nature.

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