Mysterious space object is unlike anything astronomers have seen before

Wednesday, 26 January 2022

Fun facts about space from Nasa.

Giant bursts of energy being picked up from the depths of space are unlike anything astronomers have seen before.

Australian researchers have discovered something unusual – an object that's releasing a huge amount of energy three times an hour.

Scientists believe it could be a neutron star or a white dwarf – collapsed cores of stars – with an ultra-powerful magnetic field.

Spinning around in space, the strange object sends out a beam of radiation that crosses our line of sight, and for a minute in every 20, is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky.

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An artist's impression of what the object might look like if it's a magnetar. Magnetars are incredibly magnetic neutron stars, some of which sometimes produce radio emissions. Known magnetars rotate every few seconds, but theoretically, 'ultra-long period magnetars' could rotate much more slowly.

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Astrophysicist Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker, from Australia’s Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, led the team that made the discovery.

Tile 107, or 'the Outlier' as it is known, is one of 256 tiles of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) Radio Telescope located 1.5km from the core of the telescope in Western Australia.

“This object was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our observations,” she said in a statement via the Science Media Centre.

“That was completely unexpected. It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that.

Astronomers are learning more about mysterious energy waves coming from the depths of space.

“And it’s really quite close to us – about 4000 light years away. It’s in our galactic backyard.”

The object was discovered last year by Tyrone O'Doherty, an honours student at the time, using a special telescope and technique in the outback in Western Australia.

The researchers’ findings were published in a study in journal Nature on Thursday.

Objects that turn on and off in the universe aren’t new to astronomers – they call them ‘transients’.

Astrophysicist and study co-author Dr Gemma Anderson said that “when studying transients, you’re watching the death of a massive star or the activity of the remnants it leaves behind.”

‘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 star called a pulsar, flash on and off within milliseconds or seconds.

But Anderson said finding something that turned on for a minute was really weird. The mysterious object was incredibly bright and smaller than the Sun, emitting highly-polarised radio waves – suggesting the object had an extremely strong magnetic field.

In the statement, Hurley-Walker said the observations match a predicted astrophysical object called an ‘ultra-long period magnetar’.

“It’s a type of slowly spinning neutron star that has been predicted to exist theoretically,” she said.

“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.”

Hurley-Walker is now monitoring the object to see if it switches back on.

“If it does, there are telescopes across the Southern Hemisphere and even in orbit that can point straight to it,” she said.

“More detections will tell astronomers whether this was a rare one-off event or a vast new population we'd never noticed before,” she said.