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The MWA's view of the sky; the object is marked with a white star. (Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker/ICRAR/Curtin and the GLEAM Team) Something in Earth's cosmic neighborhood is emitting weird signals of a kind we've never seen before. Just 4,000 light-years away, something is flashing radio waves. For roughly 30 to 60 seconds, every 18.18 minutes, it pulses brightly, one of the most luminous objects in the low-frequency radio sky. It matches the profile of no known astronomical object, and astronomers are gobsmacked. They have named it GLEAM-X J162759.5-523504.3. "This object was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our...

A source of repeating radio waves seen from one point in the sky presents astronomers with numerous mysteries. The source of this signal, where radiation builds and ebbs over a period of 16 days, remains a question. The longevity of these cycles — now seen continuing for over 500 days — could either present another mystery, or perhaps a clue to what is going on at the center of these displays. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one form of highly-energetic explosion in deep space. Thought to be caused by small, massive objects, although the exact nature of these objects is...

Work on this event is very preliminary, with astronomers madly scrambling to analyse the swathes of data. But many seem in agreement that it could finally point to the source of fast radio bursts (FRBs). "This sort of, in most people's minds, settles the origin of FRBs as coming from magnetars," astronomer Shrinivas Kulkarni of Caltech, and member of one of the teams, the STARE2 survey that also detected the radio signal, told ScienceAlert. Fast radio bursts are one of the most fascinating mysteries in the cosmos. They are extremely powerful radio signals from deep space, galaxies millions of light-years...

A mysterious repeating radio signal from space revealed last year is now the fifth fast radio burst to be tracked back to its source galaxy. It's a location unlike any of the others, and astronomers are having to rethink their previous assumptions about how these signals are generated. The origin of this repeating signal is a spiral galaxy, located 500 million light-years from Earth, making it the closest known source of what we call fast radio bursts (FRBs) yet. And the FRBs are emanating specifically from a region just seven light-years across - a region that's alive with star formation....

New research suggests magnetars are produced by the deaths of massive stars that were formed by stellar mergers. Photo ESO/L. Calçada Oct. 10 (UPI) -- With the help of computer simulations, scientists have come up with an explanation for the formation of the strongest magnets in the universe, magnetars. Models suggest stellar mergers can produce strong magnetic fields. When the magnetic star produced by a merger dies, a magnetar can form. Magnetars are neutron stars -- collapsed stellar cores -- with extremely powerful magnetic fields. The sun features an outer layer of convective activity that produces strong magnetic fields, but...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. Astronomy is a science of extremes - the biggest, the hottest, and the most massive. Today, astrophysicist Bryan Gaensler (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and colleagues announced that they have linked two of astronomy's extremes, showing that some of the biggest stars in the cosmos become the strongest magnets when they die. "The source of these very powerful magnetic objects has been a mystery since the first one was discovered in 1998. Now, we think we have solved that mystery," says Gaensler. The astronomers base their conclusions on data taken with CSIRO's...