If this doesn't push all of your just-a-teeny-bit-hard-to-sleep-at-night buttons, I got nothing for you:
Astrophysicist Natasha Hurley-Walker was scanning radio signals across huge swaths of the cosmos in late 2020 when she and her colleagues stumbled on something they had never seen before.
In a patch of sky that was monitored continuously over 24 hours, the scientists detected the appearance of a mysterious object that unleashed a giant burst of energy every 20 minutes or so and then disappeared several hours later.
"It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there's nothing known in the sky that does that," Hurley-Walker, an astronomer at Curtin University and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Australia, said in a statement.
Okay when an astronomer uses the word "spooky" to describe an unknown object discovered in the night sky... I don't know about you, but I pay attention.
The actual published paper offers little in the way of concrete explanations:
We find that the source pulses every 18.18 min, an unusual periodicity that has, to our knowledge, not been observed previously. The emission is highly linearly polarized, bright, persists for 30–60 s on each occurrence and is visible across a broad frequency range. At times, the pulses comprise short-duration (<0.5 s) bursts; at others, a smoother profile is observed. These profiles evolve on timescales of hours. By measuring the dispersion of the radio pulses with respect to frequency, we have localized the source to within our own Galaxy and suggest that it could be an ultra-long-period magnetar.
"What is a magnetar?" you may ask?
A magnetar is an exotic type of neutron star, its defining feature that it has an ultra-powerful magnetic field. The field is about 1,000 times stronger than a normal neutron star and about a trillion times stronger than the Earth's.
Ohhh. So instead of an unknown, creepy celestial object, we have a collapsed star with a magnetic field unthinkably, inconceivably more powerful and destructive than Earth's.
Either way you slice it, it's scary. That's space, folks.
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