CNN describes a “celestial beacon” of the mysterious space object that produces a massive energy wave every eighteen minutes.

The orbital orb was spotted in March 2018 by Tyrone O’Dherty, a PhD student at Australia’s Curtin University. He looked through the Murchison Widefield Array Telescope (MWA), located somewhere in the outback of Western Australia. “It’s interesting that the source that I was able to identify last year was something strange,” he says.

“This object appeared and disappeared for a few hours during our observations,” astrophysicist Natasha Hurley Walker and her team said. temper nature wrote about. “We didn’t expect to find something so bright. It somehow converts magnetic energy into radio waves, more effectively than anything we’ve seen before.”

The faint objects of space don’t have to be crazy. It could be a spinning neutron star, but it flashes and turns off in milliseconds. Or a supernova that can be seen for a few days and then disappears. But this mysterious thing was clearly different. He appeared every 18 minutes for a minute. “It was totally unexpected,” Hurley Walker says. “A bit scary for an astronomer because, as far as we know, there’s nothing in the sky that does this. And it’s really very close to us, about 4,000 light-years away. That’s in our galaxy’s backyard.”

What could it be? Scientists think of a dead white dwarf star, or a slowly rotating neutron star. It is formed by the explosion of the core of a giant star. Anyway, it’s “extreme physics” according to Hurley Walker.