Object found in the Milky Way 'unlike anything astronomers have seen'

Australian researchers have discovered a strange object in the sky.

The object, first spotted by a university student, releases a huge burst of radio energy three times per hour.

The pulse comes every 18.18 minutes, like clockwork, and it was discovered by a student using a telescope in the Western Australian outback.

There are other objects in the universe that switch on and off, but 18.18 minutes is the first time it has been observed.

She said that it was kind of spooky for an astronomer to find that object.

The research team is trying to understand what they have found.

The object is 4,000 light-years from Earth and has a strong magnetic field.

There are many mysteries to be untangled.

They shouldn't have enough power to produce these kind of radio waves every 20 minutes, if you do all of the mathematics.

It shouldn't be possible.

The object may be something researchers have thought could exist but have never seen.

A white dwarf is a remnant of a collapsed star.

That is quite unusual as well. We only know of one white dwarf pulsar, and nothing like this.

It could be a completely 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 conceded: "I was concerned that it was aliens."

The research team was able to observe the signal across a wide range of frequencies.

That means it must be a natural process and not an artificial signal.

The researchers will look for more of these strange objects across the universe.

More detections will show whether this was a rare one-off event or a new population we had never seen before.

The paper on the object has been published in the journal Nature.

More information: Natasha Hurley-Walker, A radio transient with unusually slow periodic emission, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04272-x. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04272-x Journal information: Nature

There will be a new year in 2022.

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