Astronomers find startling pulsing object in Milky Way: 'Unlike anything we have seen'

USA Today

3 days ago

Astronomers find startling pulsing object in Milky Way: 'Unlike anything we have seen' The mystery object, located just a short 15,000 light-years from Earth in our Milky Way galaxy, revealed itself to an international team of scientists when it was observed emitting pulses.
Astronomers recently discovered a never-before-seen celestial phenomenon hiding in our own cosmic backyard.
The mystery object, located just a short 15,000 light-years from Earth in our Milky Way galaxy, revealed itself to an international team of scientists when it was observed emitting startling pulses.
What made the pulses puzzling to the astronomers was that they came in the form of both radio waves and X-rays. Most intriguing: the cycle occurred like clockwork for two minutes at a time every 44 minutes.
The discovery marks the first time that such objects, called long-period transients, have been detected in X-rays, the team said in a press release announcing the findings.
'This object is unlike anything we have seen before,' Ziteng Andy Wang, an astronomer at Curtin University in Australia who led the research, said in a statement.
The objects, which emit radio pulses occurring minutes or hours apart, are a relatively recent discovery – with just 10 being identified since 2022, the team said. While astronomers are so far unable to explain the origin of the mystifying signals and why they occur at unusual intervals, the team hopes their findings provide some insights.
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What is the Milky Way galaxy?
The Milky Way is our home galaxy with a disc of stars that spans more than 100,000 light-years. Because it appears as a rotating disc curving out from a dense central region, the Milky Way is known as a spiral galaxy.
Our planet itself is located along one of the galaxy's spiral arms, about halfway from the center, according to NASA.
The Milky Way sits in a cosmic neighborhood called the Local Group that includes more than 50 other galaxies. Those galaxies can be as small as a dwarf galaxy with up to only a few billion stars, or as large as Andromeda, our nearest large galactic neighbor.
The Milky Way got its name because from our perspective on Earth, it appears as a faint band of light stretching across the entire sky.
How did astronomers detect strange pulses in Milky Way?
The team discovered the object, known as ASKAP J1832-0911, in the Milky Way by using a radio telescope in Australia. The astronomers, all from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, then correlated the radio signals with X-ray pulses detected by NASA's space telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
The Australian radio telescope has a wide field view of the night sky, while Chandra observes only a fraction of it. For that reason, the astronomers say it was fortunate that Chandra was coincidentally observing the same area of the night sky at the same time.
'Discovering that ASKAP J1832-0911 was emitting X-rays felt like finding a needle in a haystack,' Wang said in a statement.
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What could the pulsing be?
It's possible the celestial object could be the core of a dead star, known as a magnetar. With their extremely strong magnetic fields, these neutron stars – small, dense collapsed cores of supergiant stars – are capable of producing the powerful bursts of energy that have been observed for years.
The object could also be a pair of stars in a binary system in which one of them is a highly-magnetized white dwarf star at the end of its evolution, the team said.
But Wang cautioned that neither of those theories fully explains what his team observed.
"This discovery could indicate a new type of physics or new models of stellar evolution," Wang said in a statement.
Fortunately, finding one object using both X-rays and radio waves hints at the existence of many more, according to the researchers.
The findings were published Wednesday, May 28, in the journal Nature.
Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at [e-mail]