by Australian researchers have discovered a strange spinning object in the Milky Way they say is unlike anything astronomers have ever seen.
The object, first spotted by a university student working on his undergraduate thesis, releases a huge burst of radio energy three times every hour.
The pulse comes "every 18.18 minutes, like clockwork," said astrophysicist Natasha Hurley-Walker, who led the investigation after the student's discovery, using a telescope in the Western Australian outback known as the Murchison Widefield Array.
While there are other objects in the universe that switch on and off—such as pulsars—Hurley-Walker said 18.18 minutes is a frequency that has never been observed before.
Source
The object, first spotted by a university student working on his undergraduate thesis, releases a huge burst of radio energy three times every hour.
The pulse comes "every 18.18 minutes, like clockwork," said astrophysicist Natasha Hurley-Walker, who led the investigation after the student's discovery, using a telescope in the Western Australian outback known as the Murchison Widefield Array.
While there are other objects in the universe that switch on and off—such as pulsars—Hurley-Walker said 18.18 minutes is a frequency that has never been observed before.
Source
