The Universe will definitely never stop surprising us. Regularly, he reveals new objects to us. Unexpected. Surprising. Confusing. And today once again, a mysterious object that illuminates the sky with its radio waves like no other.
In L’Universe, there is what we see. But there are also many things that we do not see. Objects that light up the sky in wavelengths which are outside the spectrum of the seen. From researchers from the International Center for Research in Radio Astronomy (Icrar, Australia) have just discovered a new one. A source of waves radio like he had never seen before.
“It’s almost scarycomments Natasha Hurley-Walker, a researcher at Curtin University (Australia) in a press release from Icrar. Because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that.” Nothing known that releases so manyradio waves regularly, every 20 minutes. An extremely bright source at only 4,000 light years of the earth.
This source, the researchers flushed it out thanks on the one hand to the wide field ” of vision “ from Murchison Widefield Array (MWA, Australia) and its extreme sensitivity. A combination that allows “scan the whole sky and detect the unexpected”. But make no mistake about it. The astronomers are used to observing objects which they call transitory. Objects that seem to flash in the sky.
This animation shows the radio emission profile recorded by the researchers. © Natasha Hurley Walker, Icrar, Curtin University, GLEAM team
Could it be an ultra long period magnetar?
What makes this new item really special is that it lights up for one minute three times per hour. The other known transients can emit for a few days — this is the case for supernovae — or for only a few milliseconds or maybe a few seconds — when it comes to pulsar.
Astronomers also argue that the object is incredibly bright — in the radio wave domain, that is — and yet smaller than our Sun. And that it emits highly polarized radio waves. What suggest not only that it is accompanied by a magnetic field particularly powerful, but also that it is capable of converting this energy magnetic field into radio waves in a far more efficient way than anything else we know of.
This object could well correspond to a type of white dwarf — a star extremely dense, end-of-life Sun-like star — peculiar. Or even to a category of objects still totally unknown. But all these characteristics lead the researchers to think rather that it could be the very first magnetar — a neutron starfrom thecollapse of a massive star at the end of its life, surrounded by an intense magnetic field — ultra-long period never observed. The object has already been imagined by theoreticians. But no one seemed to expect him to turn out so brilliant. It remains to be seen if astronomers will be able to find other of these objects in the MWA archives or if it is a more exceptional object.
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