Astronomers discovered a star that behaves like no other ever observed and emits a curious combination of radio and X -ray waves, which makes it an exotic member of a class of celestial objects identified for the first time only three years ago.
It is located on the Milky Way, about 15,000 years-old from the Earth, in the direction of the scutum constellation, and emits flashes every 44 minutes both in radio waves and in X-rays. One year-a year is the distance that runs through the light in a year, 9.5 billion km.
According to the researchers, it belongs to a class of objects called “transient radius of a long period”, known for its bright radio wave bursts that appear every few minutes or several hours.
It is a much longer period than the rapid radio wave pulses that usually detect the pulsares, a type of neutron star that rotates at high speed and constitutes the dense collapsed nucleus of a massive star after their death.
Pulsares, seen from Earth, seem to blink in time scales from milliseconds to seconds.
“What are these objects and how they generate their unusual signals remains a mystery,” says astronomer Ziteng Wang, from the University of Curtin (Australia), principal author of the study published this week in the journal Nature.
In the new study, the researchers used data from the NASA X -ray Orbital Observatory of the Australian Askap Telescope and other telescopes.
Although the radio wave emission of the newly identified object is similar to that of others approximately 10 known examples of this class, it is the only one that emits X -rays, according to the astrophysics and co -author of the Nanda Rea study, of the Institute of Space Sciences of Barcelona.
Researchers have some hypotheses about the nature of this star. They said it could be a magnetar, a rotating neutron star with an extreme magnetic field, or a white dwarf, a very compact stellar grill, with a near and fast orbit around a small companion star in what is called a binary system.
“However, none of them could explain all the observational features we saw,” said Wang.
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The stars with up to eight times the mass of our sun seem to end like a white dwarf. They end up burning all the hydrogen they use as fuel.
Gravity causes them to collapse and detach themselves from their outer layers in a “red giant” phase, leaving behind a compact nucleus of approximately the diameter of the earth: the white dwarf.
According to the researchers, the radio waves observed could have been generated by the interaction between the white dwarf and the hypothetical companion star.
“The radio brightness of the object varies greatly. We do not observe any radio emission of the object before November 2023. And in February 2024, we saw that it became extremely bright.” Less than 30 objects in the sky have reached such brightness in radio waves.
“Surprisingly, at the same time, we also detect X -ray pulses from the object. We can still detect it on radio, but much weaker,” Wang explained.
Wang said that it is exciting to observe a new type of stars behavior.
“X -ray detection came from NASA’s Chandra space telescope. It was a blow of luck. Actually, the telescope was pointing to something else, but caught the fountain during its ‘crazy’ bright phase. A coincidence thus is very, very rare, how to find a needle in a haystack,” explains Wang.
With Reuters information
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