A team mapping radio waves in the Universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour, and it\u2019s unlike anything astronomers have seen before.<\/p>\n
The team who discovered it think it could be a neutron star or a white dwarf\u2014collapsed cores of stars\u2014with an ultra-powerful magnetic field.<\/p>\n
Spinning around in space, the strange object sends out a beam of radiation that crosses our line of sight, and for a minute in every twenty, is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky.<\/p>\n
Astrophysicist Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, led the team that made the discovery.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis object was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our observations,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was completely unexpected. It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there\u2019s nothing known in the sky that does that.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd it\u2019s really quite close to us\u2014about 4000 lightyears away. It\u2019s in our galactic backyard.\u201d<\/p>\n
The object was discovered by Curtin University Honours student Tyrone O’Doherty using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in outback Western Australia and a new technique he developed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s exciting that the source I identified last year has turned out to be such a peculiar object,\u201d said Mr O\u2019Doherty, who is now studying for a PhD at Curtin.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe MWA\u2019s wide field of view and extreme sensitivity are perfect for surveying the entire sky and detecting the unexpected.\u201d<\/p>\n
Objects that turn on and off in the Universe aren\u2019t new to astronomers\u2014they call them \u2018transients\u2019.<\/p>\n
ICRAR-Curtin astrophysicist and co-author Dr Gemma Anderson said that \u201cwhen studying transients, you\u2019re watching the death of a massive star or the activity of the remnants it leaves behind.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Slow transients\u2019\u2014like supernovae\u2014might appear over the course of a few days and disappear after a few months.<\/p>\n
\u2018Fast transients\u2019\u2014like a type of neutron star called a pulsar\u2014flash on and off within milliseconds or seconds.<\/p>\n
But Dr Anderson said finding something that turned on for a minute was really weird.<\/p>\n
She said the mysterious object was incredibly bright and smaller than the Sun, emitting highly-polarised radio waves\u2014suggesting the object had an extremely strong magnetic field.<\/p>\n
Dr Hurley-Walker said the observations match a predicted astrophysical object called an \u2018ultra-long period magnetar\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a type of slowly spinning neutron star that has been predicted to exist theoretically,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut nobody expected to directly detect one like this because we didn\u2019t expect them to be so bright.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomehow it\u2019s converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we\u2019ve seen before.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr Hurley-Walker is now monitoring the object with the MWA to see if it switches back on.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf it does, there are telescopes across the Southern Hemisphere and even in orbit that can point straight to it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Dr Hurley-Walker plans to search for more of these unusual objects in the vast archives of the MWA.<\/p>\n
\u201cMore detections will tell astronomers whether this was a rare one-off event or a vast new population we’d never noticed before,” she said.<\/p>\n
MWA Director Professor Steven Tingay said the telescope is a precursor instrument for the Square Kilometre Array\u2014a global initiative to build the world\u2019s largest radio telescopes in Western Australia and South Africa.<\/p>\n
\u201cKey to finding this object, and studying its detailed properties, is the fact that we have been able to collect and store all the data the MWA produces for almost the last decade at the Pawsey Research Supercomputing Centre. Being able to look back through such a massive dataset when you find an object is pretty unique in astronomy.\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are, no doubt, many more gems to be discovered by the MWA and the SKA in coming years.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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