Astronomers have stumbled upon a celestial object releasing giant bursts of energy and it’s unlike anything they’ve ever seen before.
The spinning space object, spotted in March 2018, beamed out radiation three times per hour. In those moments, it became the brightest source of radio waves viewable from Earth, acting as a celestial lighthouse.
It might be a remnant of a collapsed star, either a dense neutron star or a dead white dwarf star, with a strong magnetic field — or it could be something else entirely.
Natasha Hurley-Walker, an astrophysicist at the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, in a statement said “this object was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our observations.”
“This is completely unexpected. It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that. And it’s quite close to us — about 4,000 light-years away. It’s in our galactic backyard,” she said.
