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27th January 2022
11:44am GMT
"It was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our observations," Hurley-Walker said.
"That was completely unexpected.
"And it’s really quite close to us - about 4000 lightyears away. It’s in our galactic backyard.” She said that an anomaly like this is "kind of spooky for an astronomer because there's nothing known in the sky that does that". https://twitter.com/AusSMC/status/1486565225813790724 Hurley-Walker became concerned when the powerful, consistent radio signal from space was first discovered, wondering if it could have been sent by some other life form. "I was concerned that it was aliens," she admitted. The research team is now working to figure out what exactly it is that they have found and, while they have made some developments, there are still many mysteries surrounding the object. "If you do all of the mathematics, you find that they shouldn't have enough power to produce these kind of radio waves every 20 minutes. "It just shouldn't be possible." The team has since theorised that it could be a neutron star or a white dwarf - collapsed cores of stars - with an ultra-powerful magnetic field. "But that's quite unusual as well. We only know of one white dwarf pulsar, and nothing as great as this," Hurley-Walker said. "Of course, it could be something that we've never even thought of - it could be some entirely new type of object."
