MWA Director Professor Steven Tingay said the telescope is a precursor instrument for the Square Kilometre Array - a global initiative to build the world's largest radio telescopes in Western Australia and South Africa. "More detections will tell astronomers whether this was a rare one-off event or a vast new population we'd never noticed before," she said. "If it does, there are telescopes across the Southern Hemisphere and even in orbit that can point straight to it," she said.ĭr Hurley-Walker plans to search for more of these unusual objects in the vast archives of the MWA. "Somehow it's converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we've seen before."ĭr Hurley-Walker is now monitoring the object with the MWA to see if it switches back on. "But nobody expected to directly detect one like this because we didn't expect them to be so bright. "It's a type of slowly spinning neutron star that has been predicted to exist theoretically," she said. She said the mysterious object was incredibly bright and smaller than the Sun, emitting highly-polarised radio waves - suggesting the object had an extremely strong magnetic field.ĭr Hurley-Walker said the observations match a predicted astrophysical object called an 'ultra-long period magnetar'. The object was discovered by Curtin University Honours student Tyrone O'Doherty using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in outback Western Australia and a new technique he developed.īut Dr Anderson said finding something that turned on for a minute was really weird. "And it's really quite close to us - about 4000 lightyears away. It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there's nothing known in the sky that does that. "This object was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our observations," she said. Spinning around in space, the strange object sends out a beam of radiation that crosses our line of sight, and for a minute in every twenty, is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky.Īstrophysicist Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, led the team that made the discovery. The team who discovered it think it could be a neutron star or a white dwarf - collapsed cores of stars - with an ultra-powerful magnetic field.
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