Recently, astronomers revealed details of a 2018 observation of a mysterious object that emits a beam of radio waves, pulsing every 20 minutes.
Scientists believe that the mysterious object may be a new class of slowly rotating neutron stars with an ultra-strong magnetic field.
Scientists monitored the signals from the mysterious body in the first months of 2018, and then disappeared, which, according to them, indicates that it was affected by a dangerous event such as a stellar earthquake.
“It was frightening for astronomers, because nothing is known so far in space that does such behavior,” said Natasha Hurley Walker, of Curtin University’s International Center for Radio Astronomy Research, who led the team that made the discovery. The British newspaper, The Guardian, reported.
According to Natasha, despite the unusual nature of the signal, her team believes that the source may be a planet or a moving object, not a technologically advanced civilization.
She added: “The source is certainly not aliens. The team studied this possibility, but ruled it out after determining that the signal – one of the brightest radio sources in the sky – could be detected across a wide spectrum of frequencies, which means that a huge amount of energy was required to produce it.”
In the study presented by Natasha and her team, and published in the scientific journal “Nature”, the object is about 4,000 light-years away from the Milky Way, and it matches an astronomical object called a “long-lived magnet star”, a class of neutron stars with a magnetic field. More powerful than any known object in the universe, according to Sky News Arabia.
A neutron star is the dark, dense remnant left after a massive star dumps its outer material into a supernova and undergoes gravitational collapse.
Neutron stars spin incredibly fast at first, and can be detected as pulsars that light up and go out within milliseconds or seconds.
Over time, the neutron star loses its energy, slows down, and then fades out so that it can no longer be seen.