Astronomers have spotted an unknown cosmic object that’s flashing pulses of radio waves and X-rays for two minutes, once every 44 minutes.

Named ASKAP J1832-0911, the object was detected by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory. The cosmic object is located approximately 15,000 light years away from Earth within the Milky Way galaxy.

Mystery Cosmic Object

“This object is unlike anything we have seen before,” lead study author Andy Wang, an astronomer at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, said in a statement. “ASKAP J1831-0911 could be a magnetar (the core of a dead star with powerful magnetic fields), or it could be a pair of stars in a binary system where one of the two is a highly magnetised white dwarf (a low-mass star at the end of its evolution).”

“However, even those theories do not fully explain what we are observing,” Wang added. “This discovery could indicate a new type of physics or new models of stellar evolution.”

ASKAP J1832-0911 is a long-period transient (LPT), or a class of rare astrophysical events that release beams of radio waves. Unlike traditional pulsars, which are produced by neutron stars and flash radio signals every few seconds or milliseconds, LPTs emit pulses at intervals of minutes or hours apart.

The initial discovery was made by the ASKAP telescope, then researchers used the Chandra X-ray observatory to double-check their findings. Their observations also marked the first-ever detection of an LPT in X-rays.

“Discovering that ASKAP J1832-0911 was emitting X-rays felt like finding a needle in a haystack,” Wang said. “The ASKAP radio telescope has a wide field view of the night sky, while Chandra observes only a fraction of it. So, it was fortunate that Chandra observed the same area of the night sky at the same time.”

According to USA Today, one of the theories regarding what the object could be includes the core of a dead star, known as a magnetar, because they’re capable of emitting powerful bursts of energy. The object could also be a pair of stars in a binary system if one of them is a highly magnetized white dwarf star at the end of its evolution.

Researchers plan to make more detections using radio and the X-ray telescope to try to uncover more clues as to what the mysterious object could be. The research was published on May 28th in the journal Nature.

“Finding one such object hints at the existence of many more,” second author Nanda Rea, an astrophysicist at the Catalan Institute for Space Studies in Spain, said in the statement. “The discovery of its transient X-ray emission opens fresh insights into their mysterious nature.”