Astronomers Discover a Never-Before-Observed Pulsing Object in Space

Do you ever look up into the night sky, observing the stars, imagining the vastness of space? It sometimes seems so distant and unreachable that you would be forgiven to forget that it exists. Even though we know the basic principles of space due to the work of such scientists as Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and many others, so much is still a mystery waiting to be solved. A new discovery was made in the journey of understanding space: Astronomers have observed a mysterious object that emits a radio wave beam pulse every 20 minutes.

The team who have made this discovery believe that it could be a new class of slowly rotating neutron stars, which has an extremely powerful magnetic field. Repeating signals were observed during January, February and March of 2018 and then disappeared, which could mean that they were linked to a unique event such as a starquake.

“It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that,” said Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker, from the Curtin University, who led the team that made the discovery.

The team briefly considered the possibility of alien life emitting this strange signal, but it was quickly dismissed due to the huge amounts of energy needed to emit a signal so strong that it could be detected across a broad spectrum of frequencies 4,000 light-years away.

The object matches a predicted in theory but never observed astronomical object called an “ultra-long period magnetar”, which is a class of neutron stars with the most powerful magnetic field of any object in the universe. Astronomers did not believe that such an object could be detected because they thought it could not be this bright.

A neutron star is what is left of a star that collapsed, about the size of a small city and incredibly dense. Neutron stars spin incredibly quickly and can be observed flashing on and off for only milliseconds. Over time, the neutron stars would slow down, and as they slow down, you should not be able to see them.

Astronomers were puzzled why the newly found object if it is indeed a magnetar, was still emitting enough energy to be detectable. Another mystery is why the signal suddenly vanished. One possible explanation is that it was linked to a brief event such as a starquake, in which a neutron star’s extremely dense crust goes through an abrupt change, which results in a release of an immense amount of energy into space.