An international team of scientists has announced that an unusual celestial object has been discovered in the Milky Way galaxy. It could be a star, a pair of stars, or something else, APnews writes.
This object simultaneously emits X-rays and radio waves. Moreover, this radiation occurs regularly, every 44 minutes, especially during periods of high activity.
Andy Wan, a scientist at Curtin University in Australia, said that this object is located about 15,000 light-years from us, in a part of the Milky Way full of stars, gas, and dust. He said it could be a dead star with high magnetism, such as a neutron star or a white dwarf.
“Or it could be something exotic and still unknown to us,” said Wan. He is the lead author of an article on this discovery, published in the scientific journal Nature.
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory accidentally detected X-rays from the object last year while studying the remnants of a supernova, a supermassive star. Wan said this is the first time that X-rays have been detected from a so-called long-term radio transient, a rare object that emits radio waves that repeat over tens of minutes.
Since the object’s distance has not yet been determined, astronomers cannot say whether it is related to the remnants of a supermassive star. By the way, one light-year is equal to 5.8 trillion miles.
