Ziteng Wang, a physics PhD student at the University of Sydney, studied data collected by Australia’s ASKAP radio telescope in late 2020, and his team detected 2 million objects. While classifying each one, but one object in the galactic center, baffled the computer and the researchers. This object emitted powerful radio waves throughout 2020 and its irregular pattern as well as polarized radio emissions was unlike any that the researchers had seen before.
This bizarre object could not be detected in X-ray, visible, or infrared light. Eventually, they radio signal vanished, despite listening for months with two different radio telescopes. Even more surprising, the radio signal suddenly reappeared about a year after they first detected it, but within a day, it was gone again.
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The strangest property of this new signal is that it is has a very high polarization. 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. We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Ziteng Wang, lead author of the new study and a PhD student in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney.
