LOS ANGELES (KNX) – A team of astronomers and astrophysicists in Australia were mapping the Universe’s radio waves, when they made a startling discovery.
A press release by the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) revealed Tyrone O’Doherty, a Curtin University Honours student, was using the Murchison Widefield Array when a random object that released a giant burst of energy every 20 minutes, before disappearing hours later.
“It’s exciting that the source I identified last year has turned out to be such a peculiar object,” O’Doherty said in the press release.
Astrophysicist Natasha Hurley-Walker, who led the team, echoed O’Dhoerty’s statement, calling the discovery “unexpected.”
“It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that,” she said.
Kiyoshi Masui, a physics professor at MIT who studies fast radio bursts, told In Depth the discovery was “weird.”
“The reason that’s weird is because we…we see a lot of things that change in the sky, but normally not on a minute time scale,” he explained.
“We normally see, you know, the stellar explosions that might last for weeks or months even. And then we see another class of things, the spinning objects, that turn on and off every second or so, but this is the first time we’ve ever seen anything that happens on, you know, for minutes.”
As for how close this strange discovery is, Masui said, “It’s a few thousand light-years away.”
“In astronomy terms, it’s in the Milky Way, it’s in our neighborhood,” he explained. “A thousand light-years away sound like a long ways, but almost everything we look at in Astronomy, except for the very closest stars and the planets that are around are further away than that.”
Masui said whatever’s out there, he’s certain it’s not powered by “intelligent beings.”
Listen to the full interview in the audio above.
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