Just came across this in the news
"The object, first spotted by a student working on his undergraduate thesis, releases a huge burst of radio energy three times every hour.
The pulse comes "every 18min 18sec, like clockwork," said astrophysicist Natasha Hurley-Walker, who led the investigation after the student's discovery, using a telescope in the Western Australian outback known as the Murchison Widefield Array.
While there are other objects in the universe that switch on and off - such as pulsars - Dr Hurley-Walker said 18:18 is a frequency that has never been observed before.
Finding this object was "kind of spooky for an astronomer," she said, "because there is nothing known in the sky that does that."
The researchers are now working to understand what they have found.
Trawling back through years of data, they have been able to establish a few facts: The object is about 4,000 light years from Earth, is incredibly bright and has an extremely strong magnetic field.
But there are still many mysteries to untangle.
"If you do all of the mathematics, you find that they shouldn't have enough power to produce these kind of radio waves every 20 minutes," Dr Hurley-Walker said.
"It just shouldn't be possible."
Object found in Milky Way 'unlike anything astronomers have seen'
The object releases a huge burst of radio energy three times every hour. Read more at straitstimes.com.
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"The object, first spotted by a student working on his undergraduate thesis, releases a huge burst of radio energy three times every hour.
The pulse comes "every 18min 18sec, like clockwork," said astrophysicist Natasha Hurley-Walker, who led the investigation after the student's discovery, using a telescope in the Western Australian outback known as the Murchison Widefield Array.
While there are other objects in the universe that switch on and off - such as pulsars - Dr Hurley-Walker said 18:18 is a frequency that has never been observed before.
Finding this object was "kind of spooky for an astronomer," she said, "because there is nothing known in the sky that does that."
The researchers are now working to understand what they have found.
Trawling back through years of data, they have been able to establish a few facts: The object is about 4,000 light years from Earth, is incredibly bright and has an extremely strong magnetic field.
But there are still many mysteries to untangle.
"If you do all of the mathematics, you find that they shouldn't have enough power to produce these kind of radio waves every 20 minutes," Dr Hurley-Walker said.
"It just shouldn't be possible."