The bursts are periodic but highly organized and polarised, resembling the emissions seen from pulsars — rapidly spinning, highly magnetic neutron stars.
Astronomers have discovered a very unusual celestial object, GLEAM-X J0704−37, that regularly emits radio waves every 2.9 hours, the longest interval observed for this source type.
The discovery was made using older data from the Murchison Widefield Array, a low-frequency radio telescope in Australia, and further analyzed with high-resolution observations from the Meerkat radio telescope in South Africa.
The bursts are periodic, highly organized, and polarized, like the emissions seen from pulsars—rapidly spinning, highly magnetic neutron stars.
However, what makes GLEAM-X J0704−37 special is its long period and optical counterpart: a cool, faint star of the M-dwarf type, smaller and less luminous than the Sun.
This bizarre behavior has piqued the interest of scientists, who believe the radio bursts are produced by powerful and ordered magnetic fields in the system.
