Astronomers discover a mysterious object unlike anything they’ve seen before

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An unprecedented UFO has been spotted by astronomers.

Observations of the “scary” element showed that it releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour.

As it orbits in space, the UFO emits a beam of radiation, and for one minute every twenty minutes it is one of the brightest objects in the sky.

Researchers believe that the object could be a neutron star or a white dwarf – the nuclei of collapsed stars – with an ultra-strong magnetic field.

An artist’s impression of what an object might look like if it were magnetic.

Astrophysicist Dr Natasha Hurley Walker, of Curtin University, International Center for Research in Radio Astronomy (ICRAR) in Australia, led the team that made the discovery.

“This thing was coming and going within a few hours during our observations,” she said.

That was totally unexpected. It was kind of scary for an astronomer because nothing known in the sky does that.

“It’s really very close to us — about 4,000 light-years away. It’s in our galaxy’s backyard.”

Dr Hurley Walker added that the observations match a predicted astrophysical object called an “extra-long-period magnetar”.

She explained: “It’s the type of slowly rotating neutron star that theoretically would be expected to exist.

“But no one expected to find out like this firsthand, because we didn’t expect them to be so bright.

“Somehow magnetic energy is converted into radio waves more efficiently than anything we’ve seen before.”

The star icon shows the location of the mysterious object in the Milky Way. Credit: ICRAR / PA

Tyrone O’Doherty, a valedictorian at Curtin University, discovered the object using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in the Western Australian outback — and a new technology he developed.

“It’s exciting that the source I identified last year is something out of the ordinary,” he said.

Objects on and off in the universe are nothing new, and astronomers call them transients, some appearing over the course of a few days and disappearing after a few months, and others flashing and going off within milliseconds or seconds.

However, ICRAR-Curtin astrophysicist and co-author Dr. Gemma Anderson said finding something that had run for just one minute made the new discovery unusual.

She explained that the mysterious object was incredibly bright and smaller than the sun, and was emitting a type of radio wave that indicated that it had a very strong magnetic field.

The researchers are now monitoring the object to see if it will reboot, and plan to search for ore of these unusual objects in the massive archives of MWA.

“More discoveries will tell astronomers whether this is a rare one-time event or a massive new cluster that we haven’t observed before,” said Dr. Hurley Walker.

The results were published in the journal Nature.

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