Scientists have detected what appears to be an incredibly dense star behaving unlike anything else ever seen - and suspect it might be a type of exotic astrophysical object whose existence has until now been only hypothesized. The object, spotted using the Murchison Widefield Array telescope in outback Western Australia, unleashed huge bursts of energy roughly three times per hour when viewed from Earth during two months in 2018, the researchers said. An artist's impression of an object located roughly 4,200 light years from our solar system that may be a type of neutron star - the dense, collapsed core of a massive star that exploded as a supernova - called a magnetar, in this handout image obtained January 27, 2022. The object was detected using the Murchison Widefield Array teles...
Read MoreTag: Radio waves
A variable signal aligned to the heart of the Milky Way is tantalising scientists Astronomers have discovered unusual signals coming from the direction of the Milky Way’s centre. The radio waves fit no currently understood pattern of variable radio source and could suggest a new class of stellar object. “The strangest property of this new signal is that it is has a very high polarisation. This means its light oscillates in only one direction, but that direction rotates with time,” said Ziteng Wang, lead author of the new study and a PhD student in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney. “The brightness of the object also varies dramatically, by a factor of 100, and the signal switches on and off apparently at random. We’ve never seen anything like it.”&...
Read More
You must be logged in to post a comment.