A strange object in space is baffling astronomers as it releases massive bursts of energy roughly three times an hour.
The object is spinning through space and releasing beams of radiation one minute out of every 20, briefly making it one of the brightest objects in the night sky, according to a report.
“This object was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our observations,” said Astrophysicist Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker of Curtin University’s International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Australia.
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Hurley-Walker led the object’s discovery team, the report noted.
“That was completely unexpected. It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that,” Hurley-Walker said. “And it’s really quite close to us — about 4,000 lightyears away.”
Scientists believe the strange object “in our galactic backyard” could either be a neutron star or white dwarf with an immense magnetic field, according to the report.
“It’s a type of slowly spinning neutron star that has been predicted to exist theoretically,” she explained. “But nobody expected to directly detect one like this, because we didn’t expect them to be so bright. Somehow it’s converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we’ve seen before.”
The nature of an extraterrestrial body turning on and off is not new, and bodies with this quality are deemed to be transients.
However, finding an object that just turns on for one minute makes the discovery unique.
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“More detections will tell astronomers whether this was a rare one-off event or a vast new population we’d never noticed before,” Hurley-Walker said.
