The Parkes Observatory has a radio telescope that is located near the town of Parkes, Australia.
Astronomers are stumped by radio waves from the center of the galaxy.
Four objects have 888-269-5556 888-269-5556 888-269-5556 888-269-5556 888-269-5556.
Scientists think the signals could be from a new type of object.
A needle was found in a haystack.
Wang, a physics PhD student at the University of Sydney, was analyzing data from Australia's ASKAP radio telescope. His research team had found 2 million objects with the telescope.
Most of the stars were identified by the computer, and they were in a stage of life or death. It picked out telltale signs of a dead star or explosion. The computer and the researchers were stumped by one object in the center of our universe.
An artist's impression of a radio signal coming from the center of the Milky Way.
Six radio waves were emitted by the object over nine months. The researchers had seen similar patterns and emissions before.
They couldn't find the object in any of the visible or IR light. They lost the radio signal even though they were listening for months.
It reappeared about a year after they first detected it, but it was gone within a day.
Tara Murphy, a professor at the University of Sydney who led Wang's research team, told Insider that they don't know what behaves like that.
The other 2 million objects in their survey were not ordinary dead stars.
Murphy said that they started getting excited.
The team sent their data to other radio astronomy. They confirmed that no one had ever seen anything like it before.
The discovery could be related to an obscure category of mysterious signals coming from the core of the Milky Way. Only three objects had been identified before Wang's discovery.
Murphy said that the name GCRT is a position holder, while they try and figure out what they are.
The Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope were used to image the central region of the Milky Way.
Murphy is 100% confident that the signals are not coming from aliens because technological signals would cover a much narrower range of frequencies.
GCRTs have been a mystery for a long time. Researchers believe the signals are not coming from the same object because nobody knows what type of star would make those unique signals.
"Any new discovery adds to the full body of knowledge that either cements what we already know, or adds to it, or really could lead to revolutionary new understandings," Scott Hyman, who led the research efforts that discovered the three prior GCRTs, told Insider. We don't know if these objects fall into those categories. We don't know a lot about them.
There were only 3 GCRTs found after a decade of searching.
There are radio telescopes on the Plains of San Agustin, New Mexico.
In the 1990s, telescopes began observing the center of the Milky Way. It wasn't until the early 2000s that the research team discovered a strange signal from the center of the universe.
The signal faded away over the course of a few months as it got stronger. There was no sign of it in the X-ray observations.
They discovered the first GCRT. The team found another one within three years that was nicknamed "the burper" because it sent out radio bursts every 77 hours before vanishing.
These were very bright signals, meaning they were powerful. If they kept searching, they would find many more GCRTs.
"We thought we were at the beginning of a bigger problem," said Hyman, who is retired and worked as a physics professor at Sweet Briar College. The first one was easy to find and we would find more. I think we were fortunate.
They only found one more GCRT over the course of 10 years. It was also hidden in archival data. They looked at the skies with the Very Large Array radio telescopes, but they didn't see anything.
The discovery of another GCRT by Wang and Murphy didn't shed much light on what these mysterious objects might be.
Astronomers only have theories until they discover more GCRTs.
An illustration of a rotating beam of X-rays.
There are theories about the GCRTs, but they are not very satisfying.
The GCRTs could be a group of neutron stars or pulsars that circle each other in sets of two or three, so that the radio signal from one star is not seen by the others. They could be dying from running out of energy.
Some GCRTs are obscured by the thick dust that covers the center of the Milky Way.
The image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows hundreds of thousands of stars.
The new observatories are better than the old ones. He scans the new observations for signs of GCRTs when they are released by the US Naval Research Laboratory. Murphy's team will listen to the galactic center with ASKAP, and then look for signs of their mystery objects in visible or IR light.
The Square Kilometer Array would be more capable of finding GCRTs than any previous radio observatory. It will be completed in the year of 2028.
"I'm really hopeful that we can figure out what they are," he said. They could be in a very dim state. They could be very faint right now, and still be visible with a sensitive instrument.
Business Insider has an original article.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
