https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/20/magnetars/Weird radio pulses could be coming from new type of stellar object
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Astronomers puzzled over what is powering GPM J1839−10
iconKatyanna Quach
Thu 20 Jul 2023 // 22:26 UTC
Astronomers believe they may have discovered a new type of stellar object after spotting something that has been beaming radio pulses every 22 minutes for more than three decades.
The oddity, code named GPM J1839−10, lies about 15,000 light-years away, and was detected by an international team of researchers. They were searching the skies for objects that periodically emitted bright beams of electromagnetic energy after they came across something that would flash three times an hour before going quiet.
"We were stumped," Natasha Hurley-Walker, first author of the new research published in Nature and a senior lecturer at Curtin University in Australia, said in a statement. "So we started searching for similar objects to find out if it was an isolated event or just the tip of the iceberg."
The team spotted GPM J1839−10 with the Murchison Widefield Array, a radio telescope made up of a 4,094 ground-based antenna system in Wajarri Yamaji Country in outback Western Australia. It releases a burst of radio waves lasting from 30 seconds to five minutes, every 22 minutes, a signal five times longer compared to the initial object reported in a previous study in Nature.
They found that other observatories had previously spotted the same repetitive signal, but no one had bothered to study it further until now. "It showed up in observations by the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India, and the Very Large Array (VLA) in the USA had observations dating as far back as 1988," Hurley-Walker said.
