According to a release from the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) which was the subject of the study published in the journal Nature, astronomers find it really strange to find a mysterious object that glows continuously for one minute. When the explosion occurred, it was one of the brightest radio sources in the sky.
The strange object rotates in space, sending out a beam of radiation every 20 minutes for a minute. It is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky. This object appears and disappears for several hours during the observation.
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“That’s kind of scary to an astronomer because there’s no other object in the sky that does that. And it’s very close to us — about 4000 light years away. It’s in the backyard of our galaxy,” said astrophysicist Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker, from Curtin University of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research.
The researchers believe the object could be a neutron star or a white dwarf, which is characterized as a collapsing stellar core, with a strong magnetic field. However, something is releasing fantastic bursts of energy at certain periodic intervals.
Objects that turn on and off are nothing new to astronomers, they call them ‘transients’. It is the phenomenon of the death of a massive star or the activity of the remnants it leaves behind.
‘Slow transients’, such as supernovae, may appear for a few days and disappear after a few months. ‘Fast transients’, such as a type of neutron star called a pulsar, flicker on and off in an extremely fast time, milliseconds or seconds.
However, finding something lit for a minute, is really weird. The object is very bright and smaller than the Sun, emitting highly polarized radio waves—indicating that the object has a very strong magnetic field.
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