The team discovered a pulse of bright energy coming from deep space, which occurs every three hours and lasts 30-60 seconds, making it the longest-period radio transient ever detected. Long-period radio transients are relatively new to science, and it has been an ongoing mystery how they generate radio waves, however, the researchers were able to pinpoint the location of the radio waves to one specific star, a low-mass ‘M dwarf’, which they believe must be in a binary duet with another object, which is likely to be a white dwarf, the stellar core of a dying star. Together, they’re powering the radio emission.
Associate Professor Natasha Hurley-Walker, along with her undergraduate student at the time Csanád Horváth, discovered a pulse of bright energy coming from deep space among archival low-frequency data from the Murchison Widefield Array, a precursor radio telescope to the Square Kilometre Array Observatory.
All other previously discovered transients have been deep within our busy galaxy, surrounded by stars, making it challenging to determine precisely what is generating the radio waves.
Upon digging through the MWA archives, the astronomers found that GLEAM-X J0704-37 has been active for at least ten years since the array started observing; however, it could have been active and undiscovered for even longer, implying there are still many more to be found in archives around the world. MWA Director, Professor Steven Tingay, said, “These long-period radio transients are new scientific discoveries and the MWA has fundamentally enabled the discoveries.”
