Unusual Pulse Detected in The Sky May Be a Completely New Class of Stellar Object

MANISHA CALEB, THE CONVERSATION
31 MAY 2022

The discovery of a neutron star emitting unusual radio signals is rewriting our understanding of these unique star systems.

My colleagues and I (the MeerTRAP team) made the discovery when observing the Vela-X 1 region of the Milky Way about 1,300 light-years away from Earth, using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. We spotted a strange-looking flash or "pulse" that lasted about 300 milliseconds.

The flash had some characteristics of a radio-emitting neutron star. But this wasn't like anything we'd seen before.

Intrigued, we scoured through older data from the region in hopes of finding similar pulses. Interestingly, we did identify more such pulses which had previously been missed by our real-time pulse detection system (since we typically only search for pulses lasting some 20-30 milliseconds).

More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/unusual-pulse-detected-in-the-sky-may-be-a-completely-new-class-of-stellar-object