Mysterious object unlike anything astronomers have seen before
icrar.org
icrar.org
> “It’s exciting that the source I identified last year has turned out to be such a peculiar object,” said Mr O’Doherty, who is now studying for a PhD at Curtin.
That must be exciting, to make a cool discovery like this during your undergrad.
"Mysterious" does convey useful information. Something can be new but not mysterious.
"Celestial", on the other hand, conveys almost no useful information because generally every object astronomers look at is celestial.
I also didn't expect nearly all gene therapy would be stopped for over a decade due to a single patient dying in a trial in 1999: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Gelsinger That sort of educated me ot the fact that people take some medical risks really seriously (OH GOD EGGS HAVE CHOLESTEROL) and others they completely ignore/downweight (like Flu).
"Is this is the best XXX algorithm in the world?" "I have tried XXX low-level programming language and it's amazing!" "We went to the Science Museum and met XXX" "Top tips to enjoy working late at night on subject XXX and YYY" "Why STEM studies makes you look more sexy than XXX" "15 ways to look good while loving maths & physics" "You won't believe why the Riemann hypothesis was right!" "The 6 thing to do when banish Economics teacher fatigue" "Can't focus on XXX? Try this, it works!"
etc, etc, etc.
Spooky action at a distance
Neutron star (or a white dwarf) spotted emitting massive radio bursts thrice every hour
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_braking_(astronomy)
They still usually spin much faster than the newly discovered object. Perhaps someone installed a strong magnet in the near vicinity.
...and more frequent.
[0] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/physics-and-astronomy/r....
> Dr Hurley-Walker said the observations match a predicted astrophysical object called an ‘ultra-long period magnetar’.
> “It’s a type of slowly spinning neutron star that has been predicted to exist theoretically,” she said.
> “But nobody expected to directly detect one like this because we didn’t expect them to be so bright.
> “Somehow it’s converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we’ve seen before.”
> By measuring the dispersion of the radio pulses with respect to frequency, we have localized the source to within our own Galaxy and suggest that it could be an ultra-long-period magnetar.
> But Dr Anderson said finding something that turned on for a minute was really weird.
> Dr Hurley-Walker said the observations match a predicted astrophysical object called an ‘ultra-long period magnetar’.
> “But nobody expected to directly detect one like this because we didn’t expect them to be so bright. “Somehow it’s converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we’ve seen before.”
Everybody who is complaining that the PR about the paper is clickbait is right. The PR is just clickbait. The paper is not.
In all seriousness, why is it brighter than expected? What's the expected brightness for such an object, and how many error bars is it away from this value?
The existence of this megastar was falls under theoretically possible but never discovered.
Analogous would be an albino duck, existence inferred from albinos existing in every animal, but say an albino duck was not observed before.
Discovering bright pink duck would be akin to discovering something that our models cannot account for or explain.
> “But nobody expected to directly detect one like this because we didn’t expect them to be so bright. “Somehow it’s converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we’ve seen before.”
That's interesting, and apparently unexpected.
The difference is that pinkness in animals is specific to species and we have explanations for why they are pink. And we also have explanations for albinism, but it's not limited to specific species- it's found widely, across the complex life domain.
Find a pink duck? OK, the neighbor painted a duck. Find a population of pink ducks that reproduce and their children are all pink? OK, now we have an interesting situation.
> “But nobody expected to directly detect one like this because we didn’t expect them to be so bright. “Somehow it’s converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we’ve seen before.”
Why is this magnetar brighter than expected, and how does it convert energy more efficiently?
Astronomers have hundreds of years of experience in seeing things in the sky that couldn't be explained, and either were "entirely new thing we never saw before" (like pulsars) and even theorists suggesting looking for things that only got recognized once we knew what black holes were. This is common. I wouldn't describe it as mysterious, just unexpected.
> We find that the source pulses every 18.18 min, an unusual periodicity that has, to our knowledge, not been observed previously.
The mysterious (as yet unexplained) aspect of it will require updating models's physics to account for its unusual emission properties. The lead researcher herself distinguished it from known types of objects and states "completely unexpected [object]...nobody thought would be able to produce this kind of emission".
Nothing is being downplayed; the history of astronomy is littered with events like this. If they get enough data and can explain it, astronomy will be updated slightly.
The history of astronomy spans thousands of years, a high number of unusual observations will sure to have accumulated over time. But finding an unpredicted aspect of a previously unobserved class of objects is an exciting event carrying a relatively high amount of surprisal. The involved astronomers are clearly excited and being reserved with language is to be expected of formal papers. While not an astronomer, I find the resulting changes in observation patterns exciting to read about and look forward to learning about the unusual radiative properties of such magnetars.
Neutron stars are really surprising, actually, in the sense that their physics look like nothing we have on earth. We will probably be finding unexpected neutron stars and things like slow magnetars for quite some time.
One might even say it's a mystery at the moment.
I just have a strong aversion to the science->PR->news hype cycle and that's what happened here.
Here's a magnetar imaged with infrared via the Spitzer telescope: https://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/image/ssc2008-08a-ghostly-ri...
so what they are imaging is indirect effects of the magnetar, not the magnetar itself.
> That we've detected a radio source doesn't mean there's not something there in infrared as well, though.
The Spitzer image demonstrates there may be value to pointing something like JWST at it. Existence of a remnant tells us what probably made it, size of that remnant tells us how old it is, etc. (Lack of a remnant would be interesting, too.)
So how does a Neutron star generate these intense and even twisted magnetic fields?
What irritates me:
1. During NS formation the electrons are pressed into the protons, creating neutrons. So there is no electric charges left.
2. A NS is so dense, that the neutrons form a closest packing of equal sphereres. There is no room for movement of any kind of "layers" inside a NS.
===
All you'd have to do at that point is figure out how to make it blink in a pattern by intermittently blocking it
Might take centuries for others to receive but it could be a historical record.
Given this thing is only 4000 light years I way I'd like to know if there's any chance of it causing some kind of apocalypse at some point. I guess if it's a magnetar the gamma-ray-burst-producing event in its life is already past?
This doesn't seem to be a GRB. It's more likely to be a magnetar, and at this distance there's nothing at all to worry about.
First line of the article. Is it really that constant? Every 3hrs? If so could this possibly be a sign of intelligent life? I mean most likely not, I'm not getting my hopes up.
A while back I read on here a commenter saying that if they were to try and see if there's intelligent life out there, they'd release a signal periodically at fixed intervals - try to make it as "regular" as possible - so that intelligent beings would hopefully notice the pattern.