Astronomers have issued a statement following their discovery of a mysterious object sending signals to Earth every 44 minutes.
The bizarre space object was seen flashing signals from a distant star 16,000 light-years away. But it was discovered purely by chance.
Named ASKAP J1832-0911, the object beams pulses of radio waves and X-rays for two minutes at a time in perfect 44-minute intervals.
Detected by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and later confirmed by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the strange repeating signals seem to be occurring in the same region of the sky.
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The team published their findings May 28 in the journal Nature and issued a statement following the identification.
"This object is unlike anything we have seen before," said lead study author Andy Wang, an astronomer at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. "ASKAP J1831-0911 could be a magnetar (the core of a dead star with powerful magnetic fields), or it could be a pair of stars in a binary system where one of the two is a highly magnetised white dwarf (a low-mass star at the end of its evolution)."
He added: "However, even those theories do not fully explain what we are observing."
According to the space researchers, unravelling this cosmic mystery could reveal a 'new type of physics or new models of stellar evolution.'
ASKAP J1832-0911 belongs to a rare and little-understood class of astrophysical events known as long-period transients (LPTs). These oddities emit signals minutes to hours apart, which astronomers previously thought was not possible.
So far, only ten LPTs have been catalogued.
After ASKAP picked up the signals, the researchers turned to the Chandra X-ray observatory to confirm their theory. To their amazement, Chandra's observations confirmed the presence of ASKAP J1832-0911, whilst also marking the first time an LPT has been observed in X-rays.
"Discovering that ASKAP J1832-0911 was emitting X-rays felt like finding a needle in a haystack," Wang said. "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."
This dual detection system offers a valuable clue as to what could be producing the flashes. Any theory that explains the object must now account for both types of emission, the researchers noted.
"Finding one such object hints at the existence of many more," explained second author Nanda Rea, an astrophysicist at the Catalan Institute for Space Studies in Spain. "The discovery of its transient X-ray emission opens fresh insights into their mysterious nature."