Astronomers discover mystery cosmic body bursting with X-rays: 'This object is unlike anything we have seen before'
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.
One of the strangest cosmic objects ever seen just got even weirder — NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope caught it blasting out X-ray radiation and radio waves.
The mystery object, known as ASKAP J1832- 0911, is located within the Milky Way about 15,000 light-years away from Earth. It's now known to flash in both radio waves and X-rays for a two-minute period every 44 minutes.
This is the first time an object like this, a so-called "long-period transient" or "LPT," has been seen in high-energy X-ray light as well as low-energy radio wave light. The team behind this discovery hopes the finding could help reveal what these flashing objects actually are and how they launch their mystery signals.
However, not only is there no explanation for how the signals from LPTs are generated yet, but astronomers also don't know why these signals "switch on" and "switch off" at long, regular and unusual intervals.
"This object is unlike anything we have seen before," team leader and Curtin University researcher Zieng (Andy) Wang said in a statement.
LPTs are flashing cosmic bodies that emit radio pulses separated by a few minutes or a few hours. They were first discovered in 2022, making them a very recent discovery. Since this initial detection, astronomers from around the globe have discovered a further 10 LPTs.None seem to be quite like this one, though — not yet anyway.ASKAP J1832- 0911 was first spotted by astronomers using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope in Wajarri Country, Australia. The team then followed this initial LPT discovery in radio waves with further investigation using NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope, shockingly finding that its highly periodic and unusual radio emissions are mimicked in X-rays.
In fact, catching ASKAP J1832- 0911 throwing its regular X-ray tantrum was a matter of good fortune.
"Discovering that ASKAP J1832-0911 was emitting X-rays felt like finding a needle in a haystack," Wang said. "The ASKAP radio telescope has a wide field view of the night sky, while Chandra observes only a fraction of it. So, it was fortunate that Chandra observed the same area of the night sky at the same time."
The team believes the true nature of ASKAP J1832-0911 is a dead star, they just don't quite know what form that star takes. A highly magnetic neutron star, or "magnetar," is one option, and a a white dwarf — the kind of stellar remnant the sun will leave behind when it dies in over 5 billion years — is another.
'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 magnetized white dwarf, a low-mass star at the end of its evolution," Wang said. "However, even those theories do not fully explain what we are observing. "This discovery could indicate a new type of physics or new models of stellar evolution."
Related stories:
— This astronomer found a sneaky extra star in James Webb Space Telescope data
— Hubble Telescope sees wandering black hole slurping up stellar spaghetti
— Giant young star is growing by 2 Jupiter masses every year, new study shows
The hope is the discovery that at least one LPT emits X-rays in the same way it does radio waves could help shed light on the mysterious origins of these objects. That's because the fact that X-rays are so much more energetic than radio waves are means whatever the object behind ASKAP J1832- 0911 is, it must be able to produce both types of radiation. That should narrow down the field of suspects — and, there should be more LPTs out there acting just like this one, the study team reasons.
"Finding one such object hints at the existence of many more," Nanda Rea, study team member and a researcher at the Institute of Space Science (ICE-CSIC) and Catalan Institute for Space studies (IEEC), said in the statement. "The discovery of its transient X-ray emission opens fresh insights into their mysterious nature."
The team's research was published on Wednesday (May 28) in the journal Nature.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
41 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Musk Privately Complaining That His Immense Donations to Trump Didn't Even Buy Him Control of NASA
Billionaire Elon Musk's breakup with president Donald Trump, a feud that's been many months in the making, has become almost indescribably messy. In public, the pair have mainly butted heads over Trump's tax bill, which is expected to add trillions of dollars to an already colossal mountain of debt. Musk has excoriated the bill as a "disgusting abomination," ominously calling for any Republican lawmakers willing to support it to be "fired" during next year's midterm elections. As a move that's widely been seen as retribution, the White House unexpectedly announced over the weekend that it's pulling Jared Isaacman's nomination — Musk's personal pick — for the role of NASA administrator. In a baffling statement at the time, the White House said Isaacman wasn't in "full alignment with" the Trump agenda. If the move was intended as an attack on Musk, it succeeded. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the move has "infuriated" the richest man in the world, who's been seething privately to his inner circle that the hundreds of millions of dollars he paid to get Trump elected didn't even buy him the privilege of picking the next NASA head. Looking past the astonishingly oligarchical thesis that a billionaire opening his checkbook should automatically allow him to pick key members of government, the episode also illustrates Musk's increasingly shaky sense of strategy. Trump has long been known for his pettiness, arrogance, and shifty sense of allegiance; absolutely nobody should be surprised, at this point, when an attempted alliance with the longtime reality TV star doesn't work out the way it was intended. Nobody knew this better than Trump's own staff at the White House. According to the WSJ, they were attempting to bury the hatchet before Musk made his departure, and part ways on good terms. But given Musk's latest comments, those efforts appear to have been in vain. Besides fuming over losing hand-pick to control NASA, Musk has plenty of other reasons to hop off the Trump train to refocus his efforts on his businesses. For one, he has done incredible damage to his carmaker Tesla, which is still reeling from plummeting sales worldwide. SpaceX is also seriously struggling to make progress on its enormous, Mars-bound Starship rocket. Meanwhile, the real motivation behind Isaacman's dismissal hasn't flown over the billionaire space tourist's head. "I had a pretty good idea, I don't think the timing was much of a coincidence," Isaacman told Ars Technica. "Obviously, there was more than one departure that was covered on that day," he added, likely referring to Musk. "There were some people who had some axes to grind, and I was a good, visible target," he added. More on Isaacman: Trump Just Kicked Elon Musk's Hand-Picked NASA Head to the Curb
Yahoo
41 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Japan's ispace tries lunar touchdown again with Resilience lander
By Kantaro Komiya TOKYO (Reuters) -Japanese company ispace is set to try the lunar touchdown of its uncrewed spacecraft again on Friday two years after its failed inaugural mission, in a bid to become the first company outside the United States to achieve a moon landing. Tokyo-based ispace hopes to join U.S. firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace, which have accomplished commercial landings amid an intensifying global race for the moon that includes state-run missions from China and India. Resilience, ispace's second lunar lander, is expected to touch down on Mare Frigoris, a basaltic plain about 900 km (560 miles) from the moon's north pole, at 4:17 a.m. Friday local time (1917 GMT Thursday) following an hour-long descent from lunar orbit, according to the company. In 2023, ispace's first lander crashed into the moon's surface due to inaccurate recognition of its altitude. Software remedies have been implemented, while the hardware design is mostly unchanged in Resilience, the company has said. Resilience carries a four-wheeled rover built by ispace's Luxembourg subsidiary and payloads worth a total of $16 million, including scientific instruments from Japanese firms and a Taiwanese university. If the landing is successful, the 2.3-metre-high lander and the microwave-sized rover will begin 14-day exploration activities until the arrival of a freezing-cold lunar night, including capturing images of regolith, the moon's fine-grained surface material, on a contract with U.S. space agency NASA. Later on Friday, ispace will host a press conference about the outcome of the mission, according to the company. Shares in ispace more than doubled earlier this year on growing investor hopes for the second mission, before calming in recent days. Resilience in January shared a SpaceX rocket launch with Firefly's Blue Ghost lander, which took a faster trajectory to the moon and touched down successfully in March. Intuitive Machines, which last year marked the world's first touchdown of a commercial lunar lander, made its second attempt in March but the lander Athena ended on its side on the lunar surface just as in the first mission. Japan last year became the world's fifth country to achieve a soft lunar landing after the former Soviet Union, the U.S., China and India, when the national Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) achieved the touchdown of its SLIM lander, yet also in a toppled position. Despite President Donald Trump's proposed changes to the U.S. space policy, Japan remains committed to NASA's Artemis moon program, pledging the involvement of Japanese astronauts and technologies for future lunar missions. Including one in 2027 as part of the Artemis program, ispace plans seven more missions in the U.S. and Japan through 2029 to capture increasing demands for lunar transportation.
USA Today
an hour ago
- USA Today
Black holes caught devouring massive stars in biggest explosion since Big Bang
Black holes caught devouring massive stars in biggest explosion since Big Bang The three examples astronomers highlighted in a new study describe supermassive black holes feasting on stars more than three times as massive as our own sun. Supermassive black holes lurk all throughout the known universe, but catching one in the act of devouring its cosmic dinner doesn't happen all that often. In fact, unless a black hole is actively in the middle of eating gas, dust or massive stars, the ominous entities remain invisible to us. It's when black holes emerge out of hiding to feast on their prey and some type of matter is sucked into their celestial maw that they begin to glow brightly. And recently, a team of astronomers from the University of Hawaii may have seen more than they anticipated. Using both space and ground-based data, the researchers uncovered black hole events so packed with energy, they said they represented the biggest explosions since the Big Bang. The three examples the team highlighted in a new study describe supermassive black holes feasting on stars more than three times as massive as our own sun. The events, dubbed 'extreme nuclear transients,' are not only more rare than a supernova star explosion, but are more powerful than 100 supernovae combined, the team claimed. Here's what to know about how the powerful forces may have shaped galaxies and how the discovery may help astronomers better study black holes. What are black holes? Supermassive black holes, regions of space where the pull of gravity is so intense that even light doesn't have enough energy to escape, are often considered terrors of the known universe. When any object gets close to a supermassive black hole, it's typically ensnared in a powerful gravitational pull. That's due to the event horizon – a theoretical boundary known as the "point of no return" where light and other radiation can no longer escape. As their name implies, supermassive black holes are enormous (Sagittarius A*, located at the center of our Milky Way, is 4.3 million times bigger than the sun.) They're also scarily destructive and perplexing sources of enigma for astronomers who have long sought to learn more about entities that humans can't really get anywhere near. Black holes: NASA finds supermassive black hole it calls 'Space Jaws' Supermassive black holes seen eating giant stars Each of the supermassive black holes the researchers described lies at the center of a distant galaxy. And each were observed to have suddenly brightened for several months after shredding up a star three to 10 times heavier than our sun – unleashing enormous amounts of radiations across their host galaxies. The scientists involved in the new study described these rare occurrences as a new category of cosmic events called 'extreme nuclear transients.' One of the transient events the astronomers looked at released 25 times more energy than the most powerful supernova on record ‒ radiating in one year the amount of energy equal to the lifetime output of 100 of our suns. Since just 10% of early black holes are actively eating gas and dust, extreme nuclear transients are a different way to find black holes across vast cosmic distances, which in astronomy means peering back in time, Benjamin Shappee, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii who co-authored the study, said in a statement. 'These events are the only way we can have a spotlight that we can shine on otherwise inactive massive black holes,' Jason Hinkle, graduate student at the University of Hawaii who led the new study, added in a statement. Discovery comes after detection of 'space jaws' The new discovery was announced not long after NASA's famed Hubble Space Telescope helped uncover another covert black hole that had long eluded detection. That supermassive black hole was so menacing that NASA even dubbed it in a blog post as "space jaws" – a reference to Steven Spielberg's famous 1975 shark film. "Space jaws" revealed itself to astronomers earlier in 2025 with a spectacular burst of radiation known as a tidal disruption event that was so large and so bright that several NASA instruments were able to detect it 600 million light-years from Earth. Finding 'extreme nuclear transients' could unveil more black holes In the University of Hawaii's study, researchers examined three black holes discovered within the last decade. One of the star-destroying events, nicknamed 'Barbie' because of its catalog identifier ZTF20abrbeie, was discovered in 2020 by the Zwicky Transient Facility at Caltech's Palomar Observatory in California. The other two black holes were first detected by the European Space Agency's Gaia mission in 2016 and 2018. Data from a number of spacecraft and ground-based observatories helped the team confirm their findings. Though the team concluded the events to be rare, the extreme brightness they produced means they can be seen even in extremely distant galaxies. Astronomers who took part in the study say looking for more of these extreme nuclear transients could help unveil more supermassive black holes in the universe that are usually quiet. The team's findings were published Wednesday, June 4, in the journal Science Advances. Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at elagatta@
