UNUSUAL radio signals have been spotted pulsing in the sky.
According to a report in The Conversation, a team of scientists discovered a strange flash or “pulse” in the Milky Way about 1,300 light-years away from Earth.
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University of Sydney lecturer Manisha Caleb explained in the report: “My colleagues and I (the MeerTRAP team) made the discovery when observing the Vela-X 1 region of the Milky Way about 1,300 light-years away from Earth, using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa.
“We spotted a strange-looking flash or “pulse” that lasted about 300 milliseconds.”
She added: “This wasn’t like anything we’d seen before.”
The scientists found the pulse shared similarities with the emissions from a neutron star.
The team scoured through old data from that region of space and found similar signals had been emitted before but had been missed by previous research.
The strange pulses were said to be repeating every 76 seconds.
A neutron star’s pulse cycle is usually a few seconds or less so scientists started to suspect that this wasn’t the cause.
Caleb wrote: “Which means we might have found a completely new class of radio-emitting object.”
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The research teams explain their mysterious findings in a new study published in Nature Astronomy.
It concludes: “Our discovery establishes the existence of ultra-long-period neutron stars, suggesting a possible connection to the evolution of highly magnetized neutron stars, ultra-long-period magnetars and fast radio bursts.”
The location of the strange object emitting the pulses has been pinpointed with accuracy.
Scientists are now calling it PSR J0941-4046.
They think it’s a new type of radio-emitting galactic neutron star.
What makes it even more unusual is that it’s located in a neutron star “graveyard”.
This is an area of space where stars aren’t expected to be active.
The researchers think future searches for similar stellar objects will be vital to furthering our understanding of space.
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