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January 27,2022

Anna Murray 

An Australian-led team researching radio waves in space has discovered something unusual that releases a large burst of energy every 18 minutes, unlike anything previously observed by astronomers. Something extraordinarily light in space is pulsing at a much slower rate than most other cosmic objects, and it could be a previously unseen type of neutron star.

The researchers used data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in Western Australia's outback, with honors student Tyrone O'Doherty searching through petabytes of observational data dating back to 2013. The lowest frequencies are in red, the middle frequencies are in green, and the highest frequencies are in blue, as seen from the MWA. The position, named GLEAM-X J162759.5-523504, of the unexplained repeated transient is indicated by the star emblem. Given the high polarization of the radiation it emits, the object is around 4000 light years away from Earth, is almost definitely rotating rapidly, and has an unusually powerful magnetic field for its size.

The radio pulses were also virtually perfectly polarized, as researchers discovered. This usually suggests that its source is a strong magnetic field in astrophysics. The pulses also changed shape in less than half a second, implying that the source is significantly smaller than the Sun, at less than half a light second wide. While no such neutron star has been detected, according to astronomer Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker of the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, scientists believe such occurrences, termed as "ultra-long period magnetars," may exist.