Ellie Kemp
If the vastness of deep space is already enough to make your spine tingle, then you might not enjoy this latest update from NASA.
The US space agency has discovered a mysterious object which is sending signals to Earth every 44 minutes.
Located about 16,000 light-years away, it was uncovered by accident - and the phenomenon is unlike anything astronomers have ever seen before.
This object, called ASKAP J1832-0911, gives off powerful flashes every 44 minutes, with each pulse lasting for two minutes intervals.
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ASKAP is part of a newly discovered group of space objects called long period radio transients.
These mysterious objects pulse in radio waves every few tens of minutes - a super slow beat compared to pulsars, which are rotating neutron stars observed to have pulses of radiation at very regular intervals.
Scientists using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory - the world’s most powerful X-ray telescope, which is able to detect sources more than 20-times fainter than any previous X-ray telescope - found that ASKAP doesn’t just blink in radio waves, but also pulses in X-rays, on the exact same 44-minute cycle.
This is a first-ever discovery for this kind of object and opens up new questions about what it really is and how it works.
"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."
What's even more fascinating is that ASKAP's signals were found to have dramatically changed within a six-month period.
When scientists checked on it in August, they found that the radio signal had become 1,000 times weaker, and no X-rays were detected at all, compared to its signals given in February.
That sudden change left researchers scratching their heads.
“We looked at several different possibilities involving neutron stars and white dwarfs, either in isolation or with companion stars,” said co-author Nanda Rea of the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, Spain, in a statement. “So far nothing exactly matches up, but some ideas work better than others.”
Oddly, ASKAP also seems to line up in the sky with a supernova remnant - the glowing remains of an exploded star. However, researchers believe that’s just a coincidence.
The supernova debris appears to be in the foreground, like a cloud passing in front of the sun, while ASKAP J1832 is much farther away in the background.
For now, the object remains a cosmic mystery.
“Finding a mystery like this isn’t frustrating,” said co-author Tong Bao of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, in a statement. “It’s what makes science exciting.”