Imagine being an astronomer spending long cold nights in some remote mountain top locale peering
through an ultra powerful lens or pouring through reams of data from the far reaches of the cosmos
all the long days weeks and months of searching for the unexplainable something out of place a
pattern where none should exist and then it's there from quite close to earth relatively
speaking a signal switches on every 18 minutes and 11 seconds lets the startled astronomer know its
there for 30 to 60 seconds and then switches off again roughly three times an hour like clockwork
it's not science fiction it was detected by astronomers sifting through radio data from 2018.
and now they've tracked the source and the source is something we've never seen
welcome the Factnomenal today we're going to uncover what astronomers believe is likely
a brand new stellar object one that up until now has only been theorized
this object was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our observations
that was completely unexpected says Natasha Hurley walker radio astronomer at the Curtin
University node of the international center for radio astronomy research in Australia
it was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there's nothing known in the sky that does that
using the Murchison Wide Field Array Telescope which consists of 4096 dual
polarization dipole antennas in the remote outback of western Australia
astronomers were conducting a broad research effort to map celestial sources of radio waves
then as is so often the case in science they stumbled across the unexpected
the amazed astronomers found the object spewing enormous amounts of energy toward us
three times an hour the curtain doctoral student who discovered this mysterious cosmic lighthouse
Tyrone O'doherty describes it as being incredibly bright when it's on it's one of the brightest
radio sources in the sky the analogy of a lighthouse is not far off as we on earth perceive
this object as a stationary observer would see the beam from a lighthouse seemingly blinking on
and off as the rotating light regularly sweeps by and between January and march 2018 an exhaustive
search uncovered 71 of these sweeps of our earth first there was a 31-day period of pulses followed
by a 26-day quiet interval then out spring another 29 days of pulses and then silence
What the hell is even that too fast for a supernova and too slow for a pulsar
the object was given this mouthful of a name that we will abbreviate to gleam
roughly 4,200 light years away from us relatively nearby in our milky way
researchers say the puzzling source is smaller but much brighter than our sun and when on is one of
the brightest radio sources in the galaxy regular or somewhat regular pulses coming from space are
fairly common but their sources are usually easily identified astronomers call celestial
objects that turn on and off transients and they can be anything from supernovae to neutron stars
pulsars belong to the family of neutron stars emit concentrated streams of radiation far and wide
and are mostly compact and rapidly rotating incredibly dense objects their radio pulses are so
regular and precise that an international team of astronomers found the time scale based on pulsars
can be used to identify inconsistencies in those based on atomic clocks the pulses we receive are
highly polarized or twisted indicating gleam has an extraordinarily strong and ordered magnetic
field astronomers rule out flare stars exoplanets and white dwarf m dwarf binaries which would be in
the lineup of suspects if the magnitude of pulses we received were fainter this is an entirely new
kind of source that no one has ever seen before Hurley Walker said and while we know the milky
way must be full of slow-spinning neutron stars no one expected them to be able to produce bright
radio emission like this it's a dream come true to find something so totally unexpected and amazing
and now astronomers have zeroed in on what they believe sent incredibly powerful signals
our way and it's a new type of exotic cosmic neighbor that until now only existed in theories
researchers developed a profile of our suspect that matches a theoretical object known as an
ultra long period magnetar this is a hypothesized version of a neutron star the dense collapsed core
of a star between about one to three times the mass of our sun that crushes all its protons
and electrons into a neutron the densest object known in the universe if you had
a sugar cube with the density of a neutron star it would weigh 1 billion tons on earth
most often neutron stars are found spinning wildly with a strong magnetic field that spins with it
and sweeps the telltale beam through space then there are magnetars which are neutron stars on
steroids the typical neutron star has a magnetic field trillions of times stronger than earth's
so incredibly powerful magnetars however have magnetic fields another 1,000 times stronger
while we're on the subject of power astronomers observed a magnetar called SGR 1806-20 amid a
burst of energy for one tenth of a second that was more electromagnetic radiation than our sun
has emitted in the last 100,000 years so yes we have already detected magnetars 31 to be exact
and they all spin rapidly the younger the magnetar is the faster it spins and one recently discovered
is estimated to be only 500 years old and has an almost unimaginable rotation speed of 1.4 seconds
and it's only 15 miles across and still holds the mass of two of our suns
gleam is suspected to be our first detection of the ultra long period magnetar
a previously theorized form of a neutron star that rotates relatively slowly
and actually finding one is quite a surprise nobody expected to directly detect one like
this because we didn't expect them to be so bright Hurley Walker said somehow it's
converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we've seen before
confirmation of a new astrophysical object that had previously been
only theorized is and will always be a cause for celebration
Curtin University astrophysicist Gemma Anderson notes that GLEAM may be rotating so slowly
due to advanced age and losing speed over time something we will all encounter soon enough
this is more likely to be the first of its kind rather than one of a kind Anderson set
finding something that turned on for a minute was really weird the observations match a predicted
astrophysical object called an ultra-long period magnetar and while the lesser possibility exists
that it is another kind of dead star or even something completely unknown astronomers are
now specifically monitoring this object using many different radio telescopes in the hope
it switches on again Anderson added so far it remains silent this new awareness does bring
exciting possibilities of a much more focused search for similar objects in our neighborhood
in the study recently released in the journal nature the research team says the existence of an
unexpected slow pulsating yet intermittent radio transient opens up a new field of exploration of
radio surveys particularly at low frequencies researchers extrapolating the data say that
with new awareness of the class of objects and using a technique specifically to locate them
they expect to detect approximately 10 more GLEAM-like objects with the same volume of data
in other words happy hunting so what do you think about GLEAM and the discovery
of what may be a nearby object that until now existed only in theories
how wonderful is it to continually uncover the strange and unexpected and what would you like
to discover next tell us in the comments and as always thank you for watching Factnomenal