Astronomers baffled by mystery object flashing signals at Earth every 44 minutes: Like nothing weve ever seen
The truth is out there.Astronomers say they’re stunned by an unidentified object flashing strange signals from deep space.
The object, named ASKAP J1832-0911, was detected by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and NASA’S Chandra X-ray observatory — the world’s most powerful X-ray telescope.“It is unlike anything we have seen before,” Andy Wang, an astronomer at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, declared in a statement published this week.
ASKAP J1832-0911 emits pulses of radio waves and X-rays for two minutes every 44 minutes, according to the experts, who documented their findings in Nature journal.ASKAP J1832-0911 has been classified as a “long-period transient” or “LPT” — a cosmic body that emits radio pulses separated by a few minutes or a few hours.Wang and has team theorize that the object could be a dead star, but they don’t know why it “switches on” and “switches off” at “long, regular and unusual intervals,” Space.com reports.
“ASKAP J1831-0911 could be a magnetar (the core of a dead star with powerful magnetic fields), or it could be a pair of stars in a binary system where one of the two is a highly magnetised white dwarf (a low-mass star at the end of its evolution),” Wang wrote.“However, even those theories do not fully explain what we are observing,” he added.
“This discovery could indicate a new type of physics or new models of stellar evolution.”Wang and his team hope to detect similar another using radio waves and the Chandra X-ray observatory, saying a subsequent discovery will help them learn more about the nature of such LPTs.It’s not the only space discovery to hit headlines and spark conversation in recent weeks.
Earlier this month, Cambridge University Press revealed that astronomers had detected a signal extracted from interstellar noise that could be a sign of active biology on another planet.“Astronomers have detected the most promising signs yet of a p...