The truth is out there.
Astronomers say they’re stunned by an unidentified object flashing strange signals from deep space.
The object, named ASKAP J1832-0911, was detected by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and NASA’S Chandra X-ray observatory — the world’s most powerful X-ray telescope.
“It is unlike anything we have seen before,” Andy Wang, an astronomer at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, declared in a statement published this week.
ASKAP J1832-0911 emits pulses of radio waves and X-rays for two minutes every 44 minutes, according to the experts, who documented their findings in Nature journal.
ASKAP J1832-0911 has been classified as a “long-period transient” or “LPT” — a cosmic body that emits radio pulses separated by a few minutes or a few hours.
Wang and his team theorize that the object could be a dead star, but they don’t know why it “switches on” and “switches off” at “long, regular and unusual intervals,” Space.com reports.
“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),” Wang wrote.
“However, even those theories do not fully explain what we are observing,” he added. “This discovery could indicate a new type of physics or new models of stellar evolution.”
Wang and his team hope to detect similar another using radio waves and the Chandra X-ray observatory, saying a subsequent discovery will help them learn more about the nature of such LPTs
Hellbound and Down 