> The object was discovered by Curtin University Honours student Tyrone O’Doherty using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in outback Western Australia and a new technique he developed.
> “It’s exciting that the source I identified last year has turned out to be such a peculiar object,” said Mr O’Doherty, who is now studying for a PhD at Curtin.
That must be exciting, to make a cool discovery like this during your undergrad.
You know it's clickbait when you see the word "mysterious" in a headline. Why not simply write "Celestial object unlike anything astronomers have seen before."
But it is peculiar. Since neutron stars inhibit the momentum from their previous lives, they usual spin extremely fast when they collapse into a far smaller state. Magnetars do spin more slowly because of their magnetic field.
It's not that they've seen it before, it's that they haven't heard it like this before. It's almost like someone put the star on 33 1/3 instead of the 78rpm it's meant to be played.
The astronomers quoted in the article used the words "spooky", "unexpected" and "peculiar". It's not like the headline writer went completely off the rails.
I'll tell you why. I read clickbait about molecular biology when I was a teenager (quite some time ago) and ended up thinking that biology was far more advanced than it really is. it took me decades of training to understand that publicly, scientists are more optimistic and likely to overstate the quality and applicability to their results. It would have helped me a lot if the original articles about gene therapy had said "this is a very risky technology and it's likely it will never be approved because people are terrified of side effects"
Yes. I'm a slow learner, and basically the entire training system makes it hard to recognize just how juiced biology scientific communications are. There are legitimate subfields, and journals that aren't as bad as Nature. I mean if you want to be a successful scientist you have to practice some level of reality distortion to make progress.
I also didn't expect nearly all gene therapy would be stopped for over a decade due to a single patient dying in a trial in 1999: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Gelsinger
That sort of educated me ot the fact that people take some medical risks really seriously (OH GOD EGGS HAVE CHOLESTEROL) and others they completely ignore/downweight (like Flu).
Yes the World needs more clickbait that takes to actual learning resources, not people-ish articles, property porn and other horrors.
"Is this is the best XXX algorithm in the world?"
"I have tried XXX low-level programming language and it's amazing!"
"We went to the Science Museum and met XXX"
"Top tips to enjoy working late at night on subject XXX and YYY"
"Why STEM studies makes you look more sexy than XXX"
"15 ways to look good while loving maths & physics"
"You won't believe why the Riemann hypothesis was right!"
"The 6 thing to do when banish Economics teacher fatigue"
"Can't focus on XXX? Try this, it works!"
"A radio transient with unusually slow periodic emission" sounds a lot better than "MYSTERIOUS OBJECT UNLIKE ANYTHING ASTRONOMERS HAVE SEEN BEFORE" (yes, the PR uses all-caps) to me.
It radiates a signal around every 18 minutes. It sounds like a pulsar. How is it unlike “Mysterious object unlike anything astronomers have seen before”? This being the current title.
The abstract of the article suggests it is a magnetar, which depending on your mood could be counted as a type of pulsar, though it's probably more sensible to label both as types of neutron stars.
> 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.
but... magnetars aren't mysterious or unlike anything astronomers have seen. The most the press release says is that it's brighter or closer than previous ones.
The article is quite clear that this one exhibits characteristics predicted, but not previously observed, and with some surprises.
> But Dr Anderson said finding something that turned on for a minute was really weird.
> Dr Hurley-Walker said the observations match a predicted astrophysical object called an ‘ultra-long period magnetar’.
> “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.”
If I saw a bright pink duck I would wonder how that duck came to be. If someone called it's origins mysterious I wouldn't write a string of angry HN posts about it, I don't think.
> “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.”
The difference is that pinkness in animals is specific to species and we have explanations for why they are pink. And we also have explanations for albinism, but it's not limited to specific species- it's found widely, across the complex life domain.
Find a pink duck? OK, the neighbor painted a duck. Find a population of pink ducks that reproduce and their children are all pink? OK, now we have an interesting situation.
> “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.”
Why is this magnetar brighter than expected, and how does it convert energy more efficiently?
Yes, that's the interesting scientific question. The PR person saw that and somehow got very excited! The reality is, this object will be placed in a database and people will probably follow it up, but not with high priority.
Astronomers have hundreds of years of experience in seeing things in the sky that couldn't be explained, and either were "entirely new thing we never saw before" (like pulsars) and even theorists suggesting looking for things that only got recognized once we knew what black holes were. This is common. I wouldn't describe it as mysterious, just unexpected.
I'm unable to reply to your latest comment and must leave presently so I will reply here. I feel the perspective you've taken downplays things a bit.
The history of astronomy spans thousands of years, a high number of unusual observations will sure to have accumulated over time. But finding an unpredicted aspect of a previously unobserved class of objects is an exciting event carrying a relatively high amount of surprisal. The involved astronomers are clearly excited and being reserved with language is to be expected of formal papers. While not an astronomer, I find the resulting changes in observation patterns exciting to read about and look forward to learning about the unusual radiative properties of such magnetars.
Literally the last 200 hundred years of astronomy have been a series of "surprisal" that ended up being "part of the ouevre" 10 years later. Magnetars are a fairly niche area, as are neutron star in general.
Neutron stars are really surprising, actually, in the sense that their physics look like nothing we have on earth. We will probably be finding unexpected neutron stars and things like slow magnetars for quite some time.
I understand the problem of sensationalism but maybe you're downplaying this one too much? The object pulses at an unusual frequency that's never before been observed, that's something with high suprisal relative to what's known.
> We find that the source pulses every 18.18 min, an unusual periodicity that has, to our knowledge, not been observed previously.
The mysterious (as yet unexplained) aspect of it will require updating models's physics to account for its unusual emission properties. The lead researcher herself distinguished it from known types of objects and states "completely unexpected [object]...nobody thought would be able to produce this kind of emission".
I have no problem with the statement "completely unexpected that nobody thought would be able to produce this kind of emission".
Nothing is being downplayed; the history of astronomy is littered with events like this. If they get enough data and can explain it, astronomy will be updated slightly.
In all seriousness, why is it brighter than expected? What's the expected brightness for such an object, and how many error bars is it away from this value?
See the text after Figure 4, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04272-x
Since I am not an expert astronomer (just a helpful computational person who has worked in the field) I can't give you a detailed ELI5, but they talk a lot about how it looks different from existing examples, and how to find more examples of this type (so you can do surveys; modern astronomers don't like to study one-offs, as they are biased, and instead prefer to accumulate a larger sample of instances).
There is value to pop-sci's romantic relationship with new discoveries in science. I don't think it hurts anyone in the target demographic to enable their sense of curiosity and wonder. Clickbait is hardly a fair term, as this article hardly shares a floor with true clickbait like false death rumours, hate and fear mongering, and outright falsehoods.
Of all the replies to my comments, this is the best one I've seen. You're right that science reporting should instill wonder, it probably isn't that excessive to say it's mysterious or bizarre (my complaint is more the "we've never seen something like this so far" but let's not get into the semiotics of unsupervised clustering), and it's unfair to lump this in with Really Bad Clickbait.
I just have a strong aversion to the science->PR->news hype cycle and that's what happened here.
Pulsars usually "pulse" very rapidly and in very short bursts[0]. This one pulses only once every 18 minutes, but in bursts that seem to last for a minute. Some articles mention the possibility of a star-quake which as I _think_ could be caused by either further decay of the magnetar, or the magnetar absorbing more mass
The mysterious (unpredicted/as yet unexplained) aspect is the precise physics of its emission properties. It's a refinement of known physics sure, but that doesn't make it less interesting. Not unlike how finally completing a full physics accounting for how bicycles remain upright would be fascinating even if positively pedestrian.
Doppler effect would reduce both the emission interval as well as the radio frequency. Not to mention that an object (which is comparatively close to us, i.e. not just red-shifted due to distance) would have to move at very close to the speed of light to be red-shifted that much. Now that would be unlike anything we've seen before...
Because the level of "unlike"-ness exists on a spectrum, so the headline can be technically correct while implying a position on the spectrum much farther than it actually is.
We can already use pulsars for that, but this one being so unique would be very convenient. OTOH, you won’t be able to make multiple observations in a short period.
Is this the kind of thing they'll be able to point the James Webb Telescope at and say "Aha, here's what this thing is!" ? I don't know enough about the James Webb Telescope or astronomy to know what it's going to be looking at, but I know it was something about light spectrum or something.
If you're asking whether we could image the actual magnetar (assuming that's what they observed) with JWST, the answer is no. If it's a magnetar, the object itself is less than 100 km in diameter. JWST has an angular resolution of about .1 arc seconds, which at 4000 light years distance means it can resolve things that are billions, not tens, of kilometers (think the size of Pluto's orbit) in extent. The magnetar is probably also dark in the infrared spectrum JWST can see well.
Think Hubble could do the same since it so close. My basic understanding is James Webb is better suited for ultra deep space observations, because it doesn't care about dust as much.
No, the reason JWST is better for ultra deep space is because the expansion of the universe redshifts the peak of the light emitted by the really old stars into the IR band. Also it has a bigger mirror so it can see fainter stuff, which things further away tend to be.
No that's the entire point of calling it a 'magnetar'. These things convert the magnetic field into radio waves. That's the only thing that is being emitted and 'observable'. This specific specimen matches a theoretical variant that has an ultra long cycle.
from your link: "The magnetar itself is not visible in this image, as it has not been detected at infrared wavelengths (it has been seen in X-ray light)."
so what they are imaging is indirect effects of the magnetar, not the magnetar itself.
> That we've detected a radio source doesn't mean there's not something there in infrared as well, though.
The Spitzer image demonstrates there may be value to pointing something like JWST at it. Existence of a remnant tells us what probably made it, size of that remnant tells us how old it is, etc. (Lack of a remnant would be interesting, too.)
yes. that's direct imaging. Your eyes are detecting photons emitted directly by the source at their emission frequency. Indirect imaging a monitor would be looking at nearby reflective objects that absorbed those photons and emitted different ones (fluorescence, phosphorescence, heated object...)
Per Wikipedia:
"The Earth and most of the planets in the Solar System, as well as the Sun and other stars, all generate magnetic fields through the motion of electrically conducting fluids."
So how does a Neutron star generate these intense and even twisted magnetic fields?
What irritates me:
1. During NS formation the electrons are pressed into the protons, creating neutrons. So there is no electric charges left.
2. A NS is so dense, that the neutrons form a closest packing of equal sphereres. There is no room for movement of any kind of "layers" inside a NS.
If a civilization was exponentially more advanced yet still didn't have FTL travel (or FTL communication) might they harness such a galaxy-level radio signal as a beacon?
All you'd have to do at that point is figure out how to make it blink in a pattern by intermittently blocking it
Might take centuries for others to receive but it could be a historical record.
More realistically, wouldn't they be better used as locating beacons? Find the magnetar with a frequency of 18mins18s, then turn left and go just a few light years until you reach Sagitarius A*. you can't miss it!
HN discussion on this is entirely about aliens, clickbait and pink ducks (for some reason). Come on people.
Given this thing is only 4000 light years I way I'd like to know if there's any chance of it causing some kind of apocalypse at some point. I guess if it's a magnetar the gamma-ray-burst-producing event in its life is already past?
The concept of anything a light year away or more being able to wipe out life on Earth is pretty mind-boggling to me. I wish we focused more on things that were mind-boggling rather than mind killing. But that's just not how this culture is playing out.
> A team mapping radio waves in the Universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour
First line of the article. Is it really that constant? Every 3hrs? If so could this possibly be a sign of intelligent life? I mean most likely not, I'm not getting my hopes up.
A while back I read on here a commenter saying that if they were to try and see if there's intelligent life out there, they'd release a signal periodically at fixed intervals - try to make it as "regular" as possible - so that intelligent beings would hopefully notice the pattern.
At the rate of 1 bit in 18 minutes (assuming to just coding the signal as off/on every period), that's 34.2 years to transmit 1 MB. Without error correction. If its aliens, they're not in a particular rush to transmit the latest weather data.
But see, you're not thinking as a Vegan. They'd be using higher harmonics to encode much more data than just the one bit. I thought we had all learned this by now! Back to remedial sci-fi for all of you!
The period - 1080 seconds - is interesting by itself. If I were an alien and wanted to broadcast some important number, an ultra stable magnetar would be my top choice.
> “It’s exciting that the source I identified last year has turned out to be such a peculiar object,” said Mr O’Doherty, who is now studying for a PhD at Curtin.
That must be exciting, to make a cool discovery like this during your undergrad.