Researchers have stumbled upon a mysterious new celestial phenomena, dubbed ASKAP J1832 – 091 by astronomers. Photo from Space.com

News Release

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. — A strange new object has been spotted in the Milky Way galaxy.

Reports from an international team Wednesday, May 21 reported this celestial object emits radio rays and X-rays at around the same time. This phenomenon, perhaps originating from a star, pair of stars or something else entirely, seems to repeat every 44 minutes — at least during high-activity intervals.

It could be a highly magnetized dead star, according to Curtin University’s Ziteng Andy Wang, like a white dwarf or neutron star. Or it could be something exotic and unknown, said Wang, lead author of the study published in British scientific journal Nature.

The X-ray emissions were spotted by chance last year while NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory watched a supernova remnant. This was the first time X-rays were observed emanating from a long-period radio transient, which Wang said is a rare object that cycles through radio signals over short periods of time.

With the large distances involved — a single lightyear is nearly 6 trillion miles — researchers cannot tell if the object is associated with the exploded star.

ASKAP J1832 – 091, as the object has been designated, continued to emit X-rays for around a month before stopping. This suggests other objects like it could exist in the universe, and have simply gone unnoticed due to their short window of activity, scientists said.

“While our discovery doesn’t yet solve the mystery of what these objects are and may even deepen it, studying them brings us closer to two possibilities,” Wang explained. “Either we are uncovering something entirely new, or we’re seeing a known type of object emitting radio and X-ray waves in a way we’ve never observed before.”

Chandra is an orbital telescope drifting tens of thousands of miles above Earth. Launched in 1999, it observes of the universe’s hottest high-energy phenomena.