The pulse occurs every 18.18
minutes, like clockwork,” according to astrophysicist Natasha Hurley-Walker,
who headed the inquiry after the student was discovered using the Murchison
Widefield Array telescope in Western Australia’s outback. While other things in
the universe, such as pulsars, flicker on and off, Hurley-Walker claims that
the frequency of 18.18 minutes has never been detected previously.
Discovering this object was “kind of
spooky for an astronomer,” Walker said. She added: “because there’s nothing
known in the sky that does that.”
The scientific community is now
trying to figure out what they’ve discovered. They were able to establish a few
facts after sorting through years of data: the object is around 4,000
light-years from Earth, is extraordinarily bright, and has a very strong
magnetic field. But there are still a lot of puzzles to solve.
Hurley-Walker said:
“If you do all of the mathematics,
you find that they shouldn’t have enough power to produce these kind of radio
waves every 20 minutes. It just shouldn’t be possible. But that’s quite unusual
as well. We only know of one white dwarf pulsar, and nothing as great as this.
Of course, it could be something that we’ve never even thought of—it could be
some entirely new type of object.”
“I was concerned that it was aliens,” Hurley-Walker admitted when asked if the powerful, steady radio signal from space could have been sent by any other life form.
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