The Radio Pulse Every 18 Minutes
Sorting through radio data, a student in Australia found something in our galaxy that flared brightly every 18 minutes. Nothing known fits.
What was reported
In 2021, an honours student at Curtin University was searching through data from the Murchison Widefield Array, a radio telescope in the outback of Western Australia. He found an object that switched on for a minute, very brightly, every 18 minutes and 18 seconds, before disappearing.
Pulsars, the spinning dead stars that pulse in radio, flash many times a second. Nothing slow like this had been seen before. Since then, a handful of similar 'long-period transients' have been found.
Explanations offered
The leading ideas are a highly magnetic dead star, a magnetar, spinning very slowly, or a white dwarf star in a close pair. Some recent ones have been traced to white dwarfs, but not all. They're natural, but unexplained.
- When
- Found in 2022
- Where
- Murchison Widefield Array, Western Australia
- Witnesses
- Radio astronomers in Australia
- Status
- Unexplained
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