What is there??

“We’ve never seen anything like it”

University of Sydney researchers detect strange radio waves from the heart of the Milky Way which fit no currently understood pattern of variable radio source & could suggest a new class of stellar object.

The strangest property of this new signal is that it has a very high polarisation. This means its light oscillates in only one direction, but that direction rotates with time. The brightness of the object also varies dramatically, by a factor of 100, and the signal switches on and off apparently at random. Astronomers have never seen anything like it.

Luckily the signal showed up again, but the behaviour of the source was dramatically different – the source disappeared in a single day, even though it had lasted for weeks in their previous ASKAP observations.