Four other disappearing signals have come from unknown objects near the center of the Milky Way. This is the latest in a series of mysterious objects astronomers have discovered using low-frequency radio telescopes. The Crab Nebula - a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star's supernova explosion - as imaged by Hubble. Those are pulsars - highly magnetized cores of long-dead massive stars, spinning rapidly and emitting beams of radiation from their poles.īut no types of transient known to astronomers will appear for a full minute every 20 minutes, then suddenly disappear from the record. Other transients persist in the sky, flashing on and off in mere seconds, or even milliseconds. Those are usually supernovas - massive stars collapsing and ejecting their outer layers in a dramatic death. Some transients appear suddenly and radiate radio waves for a few months before fading away. They call these fleeting signals "transients." When astronomers detect a signal that appears and disappears, they know they have a dead or dying star on their hands. A handful of 'transient' signals are baffling astronomers An artist's impression of the mysterious radio signal coming from the center of the Milky Way. "It's exciting that the source I identified last year has turned out to be such a peculiar object," O'Doherty said in the release. The finding was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday. Tyrone O'Doherty, a PhD student at Curtin University, first discovered the object in archival data that the Murchison Widefield Array telescope collected in 2018.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |