WA astronomers find mystery object 15,000 light-years from Earth that science can't explain
WA astronomers have discovered a mysterious cosmic phenomenon 15,000 light-years from Earth that science is unable to fully explain, and it took a little luck to do so.
Using CSIRO's ASKAP telescope in the Murchison region, astronomers at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research detected an object within our Milky Way galaxy emitting radio waves for two minutes at 44-minute intervals.
Previous observations of these so-called long-period transients had not detected simultaneous X-ray emissions, but this was confirmed by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was serendipitously observing the same part of the sky.
Lead astronomer Dr Ziteng Wang from ICRAR's Curtin University node said it was fortuitous the NASA observatory had been trained on the same patch of space, but scientists had less luck explaining the phenomenon.
'These kinds of things are still a mystery,' Dr Wang said.
But he does have a theory or two.
'The first one is that this is a highly magnetised neutron star, which is the remnant of a massive star and it has a very strong magnetic field, and it could potentially emit radio waves and X-rays at the same time,' he said.
'And the second one is a white dwarf star in a binary system, and, as they orbit each other, that could also produce this kind of radio waves and X-rays.'
Regardless of the explanation for the exotic behaviour of the object designated ASKAP J1832-0911, the task now is finding more of them.
Dr Wang said doing so 'could indicate a new type of physics or new models of stellar evolution'.
The research was published in the Nature journal.
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