Discovered a cosmic object never seen before

By Alessandro Pellegrino

A cosmic object has been discovered but seen so far: it is a kind of lighthouse that emits very intense flashes of radio waves at regular intervals, of about 20 minutes.

Observing this anomalous cosmic source, was a group of astrophysicists from the international Research Center for Radio Astronomy at Curtin University, Australia.

The anomalous impulses discovered by the Australian researchers are packets of radio waves, very intense and several tens of seconds long, which are repeated at regular intervals of just over 18 minutes. The anomaly, according to the authors of the research, could demonstrate the existence of a hitherto unknown subfamily of pulsars, particularly ‘slow’, or be produced by a magnetar, ie neutron stars characterized by very intense and still little studied magnetic fields.

The discovery of these new cosmic sources now opens up the possibility of hypothesizing new experiments and observation campaigns to hunt for these new cosmic objects.