'Spooky' mystery space object sending out giant bursts of energy

An Australian-led team of scientists mapping radio waves in the universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour, and it's unlike anything astronomers have seen before.

The team who discovered it think it could be a neutron star or a white dwarf - collapsed cores of stars - with an ultra-powerful magnetic field.

Spinning around in space, the strange object sends out a beam of radiation that crosses our line of sight, and for a minute in every twenty, is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky.

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Astrophysicist Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker, from the Curtin University Node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, led the team that made the discovery.

"This object was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our observations," she said.

"That was completely unexpected. It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there's nothing known in the sky that does that.

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"And it's really quite close to us - about 4000 light years away. It's in our galactic backyard."

The object was discovered by Curtin University student Tyrone O'Doherty using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in outback Western Australia.

Objects that turn on and off in the Universe aren't new to astronomers, who call them 'transients'.

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ICRAR-Curtin astrophysicist and co-author Dr Gemma Anderson said that "when studying transients, you're watching the death of a massive star or the activity of the remnants it leaves behind".

Slow transients, like supernovae, might appear over the course of a few days and disappear after a few months.

Fast transients, like a type of neutron star called a pulsar, flash on and off within milliseconds or seconds.

But Dr Anderson said finding something that turned on for a minute was unusual.

She said the mysterious object was incredibly bright and smaller than the Sun, emitting highly-polarised radio waves, suggesting the object had an extremely strong magnetic field.

Dr Hurley-Walker said the observations match a predicted astrophysical object called an "ultra-long period magnetar".

"It's a type of slowly spinning neutron star that has been predicted to exist theoretically," she said.

"But nobody expected to directly detect one like this because we didn't expect them to be so bright.

"Somehow it's converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we've seen before."