Scientists have discovered a strange object in space, which they say behaves “like no other seen before.” Located in the Milky Way, around 15,000 light years away from Earth, the mysterious object ASKAP J1832-0911 is sending pulses of radio waves and X-rays for two minutes straight every 44 minutes.
First discovered by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, ASKAP J1832-0911 belongs to a class of objects called “long period radio transients” (also known as LPT), which emit intense radio waves over tens of minutes. NASA says that these waves are thousands of times longer than the length of repeated variations seen in pulsars, which are rapidly spinning neutron stars.
According to team leader and Curtin University researcher Zieng (Andy) Wang, “Discovering that ASKAP J1832-0911 was emitting X-rays felt like finding a needle in a haystack. The ASKAP radio telescope has a wide field view of the night sky, while Chandra observes only a fraction of it. So, it was fortunate that Chandra observed the same area of the night sky at the same time.”
Discovered in 2022, LPTs are cosmic bodies that emit radio pulses every few minutes or hours. In the last few years, astronomers have come across 10 LPTs, but say that ASKAP J1832-0911 is unlike any other.
Using Chandra, scientists have discovered that ASKAP J1832-0911 also emits “regularly varying” X-rays every 44 minutes, making it the first long-period radio transient object to do so. As of now, there is no explanation as to how or why LPTs generate these signals and why they “switch on” and “switch off” at long, regular and irregular intervals.
However, researchers believe that ASKAP J1832-0911 is a dead star, but don’t know what type it is. Some say that it could be a magnetar, which is the core of a dead star, while others assume that it could be a pair of stars where one of the two is a highly magnetised dwarf.
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