Even weirder, that bright beam of radiation occurred like clockwork every 18 minutes.
But pulsars pulse very quickly, usually every few seconds.
An object that sends out longer bursts just a few times an hour has never been seen before.
She’s also lead author on apaper detailing the findin this week’s issue of the journal Nature.
The galactic peculiarity could be the collapsed core of a star with an ultra-powerful magnetic field.
Hurley-Walker explains that it has the characteristics of something astrophysicists have theorized called an “ultra-long-period magnetar.”
Somehow it’s converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we’ve seen before."
