Radio Signals Detected From Galaxy’s Center

University of Sydney researchers have discovered an amazing new cluster of radio signals coming from the center of our galaxy that do not match any known phenomenon ever recorded by man. Puzzlingly the radio signals didn’t line up with any known cosmic objects. The researchers were intrigued and examined the signals further. They published their findings in the American Astronomical Society. The researchers located a formation of six lights near the galaxy’s core. Scientists observed these lights six different times from January-September 2020 and every time, the readings they took…changed.

Motherboard writes,

“Each time it was a different size, polarized every time, meaning it rotating in a corkscrew pattern at a constant rate. All of this points to the possibility that this is a new class of object in space, such as a new type of star.”

“It seems different to all types of astronomical objects we know, it may be a new type of object,” said Ziteng Wang, lead author of the study and a PhD student in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney in an email to Motherboard. “If this source is an example of a previously undiscovered class of object, it would be interesting to study these types of  sources to further understand their origin.”

 Finding A Name For The New Objects At Our Galaxy’s Center

The trouble in not knowing much about a new phenomenon is that you’re kind of limited by naming conventions. Typically objects will be named in code with the place or equipment or person who discovered it and a numerical expression of the date or location and this amazing find is no different.  ASKAP J173608.2−321635, doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue or engender the sense of wonder or mystery you’d want but given that it was observed first by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder Variables and Slow Transients (ASKAP VAST) that’s where this discovery’s name landed. The 36 antenna VAST array is specialized for this kind of work, using unusually high survey speeds to identify a wider variety of radio waves, making it the idea instrument for locating objects with waves ant various frequencies like the one Wang and his team discovered.

“Our eye cannot distinguish between circularly polarized light and unpolarised one, but ASKAP has the equivalent of polaroid sunglasses to filter it out,” Wang said. “These kinds of sources are really rare, usually we only found ten out of thousands of sources polarized in one observation.”

The South African MeerKAT telescope with its 64-dish array was also used after the initial find to take some refined readings (and would’ve made for a cooler name if the roles were reversed), and helped to narrow the list down to a few possibilities of what the cluster could be. Researchers have settled upon: a low-mass, or low-brightness star, a pulsar,  a magnetar,  or a Galactic Center Radio Transient, the latter being a scientific term for ‘we have no idea’.  But so far none of the hypotheses quite fit the readings Wang and his team are seeing, so more observation is required to refine their findings. Right now it’s just too hard to say, they could settle on it being a GCRT but Wang told Motherboard “We don’t even know if all GCRTs share a common origin.”

“We need to do further investigations,” Wang said. “We might be able to use this kind of source as a clue to research something exciting, such as the expansion of the universe, fate of stars.” So like Wang and his team, we’ll watch, wait and wonder (and quietly hope they find a better name for it!)