Happy 10th Birthday, Curiosity! MailOnline looks at NASA rover's biggest achievements so far as it.Who will be the first WOMAN to walk on the moon? How a helicopter-flying mother of twin girls, ex-UK rugby.Unfortunately, this further discovery did not reveal much more about the secrets of the radio source, so the team want to keep a close eye on the object to look for more clues. 'Luckily, the signal returned, but we found that the behaviour of the source was dramatically different – the source disappeared in a single day, even though it had lasted for weeks in our previous ASKAP observations.' 'Because the signal was intermittent, we observed it for 15 minutes every few weeks, hoping that we would see it again,' said Professor Murphy. So from November last year, follow-up observations were conducted with the more sensitive South African Radio Astronomy Observatory's MeerKAT telescope. They turned to the Parkes radio telescope the town of Parkes, New South Wales, but again failed to detect the source. They made their discovery using the CSIRO's ASKAP radio telescope in the Western Australia desert – a synthesis array consisting of 36 dish antennas, each about 40 feet (12 metres) in diameter.ĬSIRO's ASKAP radio telescope at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, about 500 miles (800km) north of PerthĪfter detecting six radio signals from the source over nine months in 2020, the astronomers tried to find the object in visual light – but found nothing. Wang lead an international team that includes scientists from Australia's national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). 'And we don't really understand those sources, anyway, so this adds to the mystery.' 'While our new object, ASKAP J173608.2-321635, does share some properties with GCRTs there are also differences,' said study author Professor David Kaplan from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
The newly-found object has some parallels with an emerging class of mysterious objects known as galactic centre radio transients (GCRTs), including one dubbed the 'cosmic burper', officially called GCRT J1745−3009.Īs the name suggests, GCRTs are flashing radio signals that originate from near the galactic centre.
'But the signals from this new source don't match what we expect from these types of celestial objects.' 'At first we thought it could be a pulsar – a very dense type of spinning dead star – or else a type of star that emits huge solar flares,' Wang said. Pulsars are neutron stars – the collapsed cores of giant stars – that emit beams of radiation that sweep through Earth's line of sight. 'So while we don’t know exactly what is causing them, we are confident it is a natural, astronomical source.' 'For example the radio emission is what we call broadband – it covers a very wide range of frequencies and this could not be generated by an artificial source. 'They have a lot of properties that mean we know they must be from something astronomical,' she said. Previously, astronomers have discovered more than 3,200 other stars with planets orbiting them in our galaxy.īut professor Murphy told MailOnline that the signals couldn't be coming from an alien life form. 'This object was unique in that it started out invisible, became bright, faded away and then reappeared. 'Looking towards the centre of the Galaxy, we found ASKAP J173608.2-321635, named after its coordinates. 'We have been surveying the sky with ASKAP to find unusual new objects with a project known as Variables and Slow Transients (VAST), throughout 20,' said Professor Tara Murphy at the University of Sydney's Institute for Astronomy. ASKAP J173608.2-321635 has now been picked up 17 times in under two years, they say.
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