Astronomers have stumbled upon a real cosmic mystery — an object with extremely strange behavior that may shed light on the mysterious signals that have puzzled scientists for decades.
A team led by researchers from the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR, Australia) has discovered the object ASKAP J1832-0911. It turned out to be a representative of an extremely rare class — the so-called long-period radio transients (LPT). These elusive objects emit powerful radio pulses not every second, like familiar pulsars, but at unusually long and stable intervals — minutes or even hours. The first LPT was only discovered in 2022, and now there are only about a dozen such “oddities” known.
What makes J1832-0911, located 15,000 light-years away in the Milky Way, such a sensation? First and foremost, its remarkable synchronism. When the ASKAP observatory recorded its radio pulses, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory happened to be observing the same area of the sky. This incredible coincidence made it possible to detect simultaneous X-ray emission from an LPT-type object for the first time in history.
The analysis revealed a striking pattern: every 44 minutes, J1832-0911 explodes with simultaneous powerful pulses of radio waves and X-rays that last for about two minutes. This behavior is completely unique among all known objects in our galaxy and does not fit into any familiar model, the authors note in an article published in the journal Nature.
What could be the source?
Astronomers have put forward two main hypotheses. However, neither fully explains the observations:
- A magnetar is the superdense core of a dead star with an incredibly strong magnetic field. Simultaneous radio and X-ray bursts have previously been recorded from magnetars, which makes this version plausible.
- An unusual binary system. It may be a pair of stars: a white dwarf and its companion (e.g., a red dwarf). The interaction between them could generate powerful pulses in various ranges, including radio and X-rays.
However, as Wang and his colleagues point out, the properties of J1832-0911 are too extreme even for these exotic scenarios. This means that astronomers have probably encountered something completely new that requires a rethinking of fundamental ideas about the evolution of stars and the behavior of matter under extreme conditions.
The discovery of one such object is just the tipping point. The discovery suggests that there may be many such “chimeras” in the Galaxy,” noted study co-author Nanda Rea of the Space Science Institute.
Previously, a binary system was discovered with a pulsar rotating inside a helium star.
According to icrar.org
