Australian astronomers have chanced across an object hidden in our galaxy that should not exist.
Three times an hour, like clockwork, the object releases a massive burst of radio waves for a minute, briefly becoming the brightest object in the sky at those invisible frequencies.Astrophysicist Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, said that behaviour was unlike anything that had been recorded.
“Because we didn’t expect this kind of radio emission to be possible, the fact that it exists tells us that some kind of extreme physical processes must be happening,” she said. The researchers used data gathered by the Murchison Widefield Array telescope in outback Western Australia, with honours student Tyrone O’Doherty using custom-designed code to trawl through petabytes of observational data stretching back to 2013.“It’s exciting that the source I identified last year has turned out to be such a peculiar object,” Mr O’Doherty said.
“I’ve mentioned this during talks about 20 times last year, and everyone was like “can I put my telescope at your disposal” because it’s such an exciting thing to find a new class of object,” she said.
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