Astronomers Terrifying New Discovery Only Theorized To Exist

 

Imagine being an astronomer spending long cold nights in some remote mountain top locale peering through an ultra powerful lens or pouring through reams of data from the far reaches of the cosmos all the long days weeks and months of searching for the unexplainable something out of place a pattern where none should exist and then it's there from quite close to earth relatively speaking a signal switches on every 18 minutes and 11 seconds lets the startled astronomer know its there for 30 to 60 seconds and then switches off again roughly three times an hour like clockwork it's not science fiction it was detected by astronomers sifting through radio data from 2018.

 and now they've tracked the source and the source is something we've never seen welcome the Science Reads today we're going to uncover what astronomers believe is likely a brand new stellar object one that

 up until now has only been theorized

 this object was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our observations that was completely unexpected says Natasha Hurley walker radio astronomer at the Curtin University node of the international center for radio astronomy research in Australia it was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there's nothing known in the sky that does that using the Murchison Wide Field Array

 Telescope which consists of 4096 dual polarization dipole antennas in the

 remote outback of western Australia

 astronomers were conducting a broad research effort to map celestial sources of radio waves then as is so often the case in science they stumbled across the unexpected

 the amazed astronomers found the object spewing enormous amounts of energy toward us three times an hour the curtain doctoral student who discovered this mysterious cosmic lighthouse Tyrone O'doherty describes it as being incredibly bright when it's on it's one of the brightest radio sources in the sky the analogy of a lighthouse is not far off as we on earth perceive this object as a stationary observer would see the beam from a lighthouse seemingly blinking on and off as the rotating light regularly sweeps by and between January and march 2018 an exhaustive search uncovered 71 of these sweeps of our earth first there was a 31-day period of pulses followed by a 26-day quiet interval then out spring another 29 days of pulses and then silence What the hell is even that too fast for a supernova and too slow for a pulsar the object was given this mouthful of a name that we will abbreviate to gleam roughly 4,200 light years away from

 us relatively nearby in our milky way researchers say the puzzling source is smaller but much brighter than our sun and when on is one of the brightest radio sources in the galaxy regular or somewhat regular pulses coming from space are fairly common but their sources are usually easily identified astronomers call celestial objects that turn on and off transients and they can be anything from supernovae to neutron stars pulsars belong to the family of neutron stars emit concentrated streams of radiation far and wide and are mostly compact and rapidly rotating incredibly dense objects their radio pulses are so regular and precise that an international team of astronomers found the time scale based on pulsars can be used to identify inconsistencies in those based on atomic clocks the pulses we receive are highly polarized or twisted indicating gleam has an extraordinarily strong and ordered magnetic field astronomers rule out flare stars exoplanets and white dwarf m dwarf binaries which would be in the lineup of suspects if the magnitude of pulses we received were fainter this is an entirely new kind of source that no one has ever seen before Hurley Walker said and while we know the milky way must be full of slow-spinning neutron stars no one expected them to be able to produce bright radio emission like this it's a dream come true to find something so totally unexpected and amazing and now astronomers have zeroed in on what they believe sent incredibly powerful signals our way and it's a new type of exotic cosmic neighbor that until now only existed in theories researchers developed a profile of our suspect that matches a theoretical object known as an ultra long period magnetar this is a hypothesized version of a neutron star the dense collapsed core of a star between about one to three times the mass of our sun that crushes all its protons and electrons into a neutron the densest object known in the universe if you had a sugar cube with the density of a neutron star it would weigh 1 billion tons on earth most often neutron stars are found spinning wildly with a strong magnetic field that spins with it and sweeps the telltale beam through space then there are magnetars which are neutron stars on steroids the typical neutron star has a magnetic field trillions of times stronger than earth's so incredibly powerful magnetars however have magnetic fields another 1,000 times stronger while we're on the subject of power astronomers observed a magnetar called SGR 1806-20 amid a burst of energy for one tenth of a second that was more electromagnetic radiation than our sun has emitted in the last 100,000 years so yes we have already detected magnetars 31 to be exact and they all spin rapidly the younger the magnetar is the faster it spins and one recently discovered is estimated to be only 500 years old and has an almost unimaginable rotation speed of 1.4 seconds and it's only 15 miles across and

 still holds the mass of two of our suns gleam is suspected to be our first

 detection of the ultra long period magnetar a previously theorized form of a neutron star that rotates relatively slowly

 and actually finding one is quite a surprise nobody expected to directly detect one like this because we didn't expect them to be so bright Hurley Walker said somehow it's converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we've seen before confirmation of a new astrophysical

 object that had previously been

 only theorized is and will

 always be a cause for celebration

 Curtin University astrophysicist Gemma Anderson notes that GLEAM may be rotating so slowly due to advanced age and losing speed over time something we will all encounter soon enough this is more likely to be the first of its kind rather than one of a kind Anderson set finding something that turned on for a minute was really weird the observations match a predicted astrophysical object called an ultra-long period magnetar and while the lesser possibility exists that it is another kind of dead star or even something completely unknown astronomers are now specifically monitoring this object using many different radio telescopes in the hope it switches on again Anderson added so far it remains silent this new awareness does bring exciting possibilities of a much more focused search for similar objects in our neighborhood in the study recently released in the journal nature the research team says the existence of an unexpected slow pulsating yet intermittent radio transient opens up a new field of exploration of radio surveys particularly at low frequencies researchers extrapolating the data say that with new awareness of the class of objects and using a technique specifically to locate them they expect to detect approximately 10 more GLEAM-like objects with the same volume of data in other words happy hunting so what do you think about GLEAM and the discovery of what may be a nearby object that

 until now existed only in theories

 how wonderful is it to continually uncover the strange and unexpected and what would you like to discover next tell us in the comments