Astronomers recently discovered a never-before-seen celestial phenomenonhiding in our own cosmic backyard. The mystery object, located just a short 15,000 light-years from Earth inour Milky Way galaxy, revealed itself to an international team of scientists when it wasobserved emitting startling pulses. What made the pulses puzzling to the astronomers was that they came in the form of both radio waves and X-rays. Most intriguing: the cycle occurred like clockwork for two minutes at a time every 44 minutes. The discovery marks the first time that such objects, called long-period transients, have been detected in X-rays, the team saidin a press releaseannouncing the findings. "This object is unlike anything we have seen before,"Ziteng Andy Wang, an astronomer at Curtin University in Australia who led the research, said in a statement. The objects, which emit radio pulses occurring minutes or hours apart, are a relatively recent discovery – with just 10 being identified since 2022, the team said. While astronomers are so far unable to explain the origin of the mystifying signals and why they occur at unusual intervals, the team hopes their findings provide some insights. Milky Way photos:Stunning images of our galaxy making itself visible around the globe TheMilky Wayis our home galaxy with a disc of stars that spans more than 100,000 light-years. Because it appears as a rotating disc curving out from a dense central region, the Milky Way isknown as a spiral galaxy. Our planet itself islocated along one of the galaxy's spiral arms, about halfway from the center, according to NASA. The Milky Waysits in a cosmic neighborhood called the Local Group that includes more than 50 other galaxies. Those galaxies can be as small as a dwarf galaxy with up to only a few billion stars, or as large asAndromeda, our nearest large galactic neighbor. The Milky Way got its name because from our perspective on Earth, it appears as a faint band of light stretching across the entire sky. The teamdiscovered the object, known as ASKAP J1832-0911, in the Milky Way by using a radio telescope in Australia. The astronomers, all from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, then correlated the radio signals with X-ray pulses detected by NASA's space telescope, theChandra X-ray Observatory. The Australian radio telescope has a wide field view of the night sky, whileChandra observes only a fraction of it. For that reason, the astronomers say it was fortunate that Chandra was coincidentally observing the same area of the night sky at the same time. "Discovering that ASKAP J1832-0911 was emitting X-rays felt like finding a needle in a haystack," Wang said in a statement. Astronomy:Fast radio burst detected in 'dead' galaxy raises questions about mysterious signals It's possible the celestial object could be the core of a dead star, known as a magnetar. With their extremely strong magnetic fields, these neutron stars – small, dense collapsed cores of supergiant stars – arecapable of producing the powerful bursts of energythat have been observed for years. The object could also be a pair of stars in a binary system in which one of them isa highly-magnetized white dwarf starat the end of its evolution, the team said. But Wang cautioned that neither of those theories fully explains what his team observed. "This discovery could indicate a new type of physics or new models of stellar evolution," Wang said in a statement. Fortunately, finding one object using both X-rays and radio waves hints at the existence of many more, according to the researchers. The findings werepublishedWednesday, May 28, in the journal Nature. Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at elagatta@gannett.com This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Strange pulsing object spotted in Milky Way: Here's what it could be
