So they looked again, knowing that the chance was high they would find another long-term radio source. But by the time they analyzed the data in 2020, it was no longer producing radio waves, according to Hurley-Walker. Using data gathered in 2018, astronomers first detected another magnetar spinning much slower than usual and sending similar signals every 18 minutes. Natasha Hurley-Walker said in a statement on ICRAR's website.Īlien technology? Harvard professor finds fragments that could be of otherworldly origin First signal detected from 2018 data “This remarkable object challenges our understanding of neutron stars and magnetars, which are some of the most exotic and extreme objects in the universe,” lead author Dr. Believed to be coming from around 15,000 light years away from Earth, the signal has been occurring at intervals and for a period of time previously thought to be impossible. The discovery of the signal, which researchers named GPMJ1839-10, has the scientists baffled. That's what Curtin University astronomers from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research ( ICRAR) concluded in research published last week in the journal Nature. "We expect the power of this telescope will help us solve mysteries such as this latest discovery, but it will also open vast new swathes of the cosmos to exploration in the radio spectrum.Mysterious radio wave pulses from deep in space have been hitting Earth for decades, but the scientists who recently discovered them have no concrete explanation for the origin of the signals.įor 35 years, the strange blasts of energy in varying levels of brightness have occurred like clockwork approximately every 20 minutes, sometimes lasting for five minute intervals. It will be able to make sensitive maps of the sky every day," Professor Murphy said. "Within the next decade, the transcontinental Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope will come online. The scientists plan to keep a close eye on the object to look for more clues as to what it might be. And we don't really understand those sources, anyway, so this adds to the mystery." "While our new object, ASKAP J173608.2-321635, does share some properties with GCRTs there are also differences. Mr Wang's co-supervisor, Professor David Kaplan from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said: "The information we do have has some parallels with another emerging class of mysterious objects known as Galactic Centre Radio Transients, including one dubbed the 'cosmic burper'. However, this further discovery did not reveal much more about the secrets of this transient radio source. "Luckily, the signal returned, but we found that the behaviour of the source was dramatically different - the source disappeared in a single day, even though it had lasted for weeks in our previous ASKAP observations." Follow-up observations were with the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory's MeerKAT telescope. Mr Wang and an international team, including scientists from Australia's national science agency CSIRO, Germany, the United States, Canada, South Africa, Spain and France discovered the object using the CSIRO's ASKAP radio telescope in Western Australia. The discovery of the object has been published today in the Astrophysical Journal. But the signals from this new source don't match what we expect from these types of celestial objects," Mr Wang said. "At first we thought it could be a pulsar - a very dense type of spinning dead star - or else a type of star that emits huge solar flares. Pulsars, supernovae, flaring stars and fast radio bursts are all types of astronomical objects whose brightness varies. With tremendous advances in radio astronomy, the study of variable or transient objects in radio waves is a huge field of study helping us to reveal the secrets of the Universe. Many types of star emit variable light across the electromagnetic spectrum. "The brightness of the object also varies dramatically, by a factor of 100, and the signal switches on and off apparently at random. This means its light oscillates in only one direction, but that direction rotates with time," said Ziteng Wang, lead author of the new study and a PhD student in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney. "The strangest property of this new signal is that it is has a very high polarisation.
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