United Nations team of scientists I discovered a mysterious stellar object that emits a five-minute pulse every 22 minutes, which that challenged previous understandings of space. Some skeptics do not consider it to be something natural, but rather the product of extraterrestrials trying to communicate, although researchers dismiss this idea.
The object in question was discovered by astronomers from the Curtil University of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) and considering that it could be a ultra long period magnetar.
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It is a type of stars made up of neutrons that have extremely strong magnetic fields which can produce powerful bursts of energy that are expelled for brief periods in the form of X-rays and gamma ray.
Known magnetars release this energy at intervals ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes. The discovered object emits radio waves every 22 minutes, which would make it the magnetar with the longest time-lapse ever detected.
The strange object that sends pulses towards Earth
Not all magnetars produce radio waves enough to be captured by the radio telescopes of the Land. Some exist by the call ‘line of death’a critical threshold where a star’s magnetic field becomes too weak to be able to generate high-energy emissions.
“The object that we have discovered is spinning too slowly to produce radio waves, it is below the line of death,” he said. Natasha Hurley-Walkerlead research supervisor.
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Furthermore, the author clarified: “Assuming it is a magnetar, it should not be possible for this object to produce radio waves. but we are watching”. And he emphasized, “whatever the mechanism behind this is extraordinary.”
The doctor also commented that the supposed magnetar, called GPM J1839-10It is 15,000 light years away from Earth, in the constellation sctutumand has been emitting pulsations for at least 33 years.
The team reviewed the archives of the world’s leading radio telescopes and thus discovered that the signal from the object had first been detected in 1988. “I was five years old when our telescopes first recorded this object, but no one noticed it and they remained hidden in the data for 33 years,” Hurley-Walker said.
The researchers argue that this discovery raises new questions about the formation of magnetars and could even shed light on the origin of mysterious phenomena in space like fast radio bursts, bright, powerful emissions that oscillate in fractions of a second.
But first the team must carry out more observations to see if they were able to discover stellar objects similar to GPM J1839-10. This could help confirm once and for all whether the mystery object is an ultra-long-lived magnetar or perhaps something even more phenomenalas a link with extraterrestrials, according to what some consider.
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How the stellar object that emits pulses was discovered
The stellar object is the second of its kind ever detected. Its discovery came after the first sighting of an ultra-long-lived magnetar, which produced a giant burst of energy three times an hour, was made. It was unlike anything astronomers had seen before.
The first finding was made by a research student undergraduate from Curtin University, named Tyrone O’Doherty, and was made public last year, leaving scientists at the institution ‘stumped’.
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“We started looking for similar objects to find out if they were captured from an isolated event or just from the tip of the iceberg,” Hurley-Walker said.
Between July and September 2022 the team scanned space using the radio telescope Murchison Wide Field Array (MWA)located inside Western Australia. A short time later they succeeded in detecting the second putative ultra-long-period magnetar.
Others were also used to confirm the discovery. radio telescopes around the worldincluding the three CSIROs in Australia, the MeerKAT in South Africa, the 10m Grantecan Telescope (GTC) and the XMM-Newton Space Telescope.
“This remarkable object challenged our understanding of neutron stars and magnetars, which are some of the most exotic and extreme objects in the universe,” the author concluded.
The research was published this Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature.
RV / Gi
