Australian researchers have discovered a strange spinning object in the Milky Way. The object was spotted by a university student working on his undergraduate thesis. It released a huge burst of radio energy three times every hour.
The pulse comes in every 18.18 minutes, like clockwork. Scientists used a telescope in the Western Australian outback known as the Murchison Widefield Array.
There are other objects in the universe that switch on and off. Scientists said, 18.18 minutes is a frequency that has never been observed before. Scientists are now working to understand what they have found. Scientists looked back through years of data.
They have established a few facts. Such as, the object is about 4,000 light-years from Earth. It is incredibly bright and has an extremely strong magnetic field. But there are many mysteries as well.
Scientists have theorized, the object can be a white dwarf, a remnant of a collapsed star.
The powerful, consistent radio signal from space could have been sent by some other life form. Scientists also observed the signal across a wide range of frequencies.
Scientists will look for more of these strange objects across the universe. The research paper has been published in the journal Nature.