Africa-Press – Rwanda. The unusual object was spotted by Curtin University honours student Tyrone O’Doherty using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope. A team of researchers led by Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker, an astrophysicist from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), has detected an unusual object in space that emits a giant burst of energy about three times per hour.
According to phys.org, the object in question is “unlike anything astronomers have seen before”, though the team suspects that their find could be a neutron star or a white dwarf with an “ultra-powerful” magnetic field.
The object, which becomes “one of the brightest radio sources in the sky” for one minute in every 20 as it sends out a beam of radiation that crosses our planet’s line of sight, was spotted by Curtin University honours student Tyrone O’Doherty using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope, with O’Doherty remarking that “the MWA’s wide field of view and extreme sensitivity are perfect for surveying the entire sky and detecting the unexpected.”
While Dr. Gemma Anderson, ICRAR-Curtin astrophysicist and co-author of the new study, noted that the object was smaller than the sun and very bright, emitting highly-polarised radio waves, Hurley-Walker suggested that the observations “match a predicted astrophysical object called an ultra-long period magnetar”, as the media outlet put it.
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