This phenomenon began like many modern discoveries: with a “Huh, is this really right?” That’s because, in the vastness of the night sky, 15,000 light-years away from Earth, an object decided to do something quite unusual. Every 44 minutes, with almost robotic precision, it sends out a signal. And it’s not a discreet pulse, like an alarm blinking in the background; it’s actually a burst of radio waves and X-rays that lasts for two full minutes, followed by silence. Now, scientists are trying to decipher this “cosmic Morse code.” Some progress is already being made, so much so that, for a while, not even astronomers knew exactly what they were seeing.
The universe just spoke in two languages — and we were finally listening
To give more context to this situation, the first to capture this unusual pulse was the ASKAP telescope in Australia. It achieved this milestone thanks to its enormous field of view, as well as its excellent ability to capture long-distance radio signals. But here comes an almost cinematic element: at the exact moment ASKAP recorded the signal, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory was pointing at the same point in the sky.
To give you a better idea of what happened, this is like watching a 1950s show on a black-and-white TV and discovering that, miraculously, it’s also being broadcast in 4K Dolby Atmos. In other words, the universe was speaking two languages at once. And this detail changes everything. Until now, no other object of this class had been observed emitting radio and X-rays simultaneously.
A mysterious pulse hints at a new class of cosmic objects
It was only after these simultaneous detections that scientists named the culprit: ASKAP J1832-0911. Importantly, it may conceal a new category of cosmic object. This is largely because it belongs to an extremely rare group of phenomena known as long-period transients, or LPTs. These objects, like space beacons, emit beams of energy at intervals previously thought impossible. Most known pulsars, for example, fire signals every few seconds or milliseconds. LPTs, on the other hand, take minutes or even hours to emit another pulse.
“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.
It’s really quite different… Just to give you an idea, so far, only 10 LPT objects have been detected since 2022, and this is the first to also shine in X-rays. This detail, in fact, could help astronomers figure out exactly what’s behind this mysterious repetition (just as NASA did when it unraveled a 57-year-old signal that came from a ‘dead’ object).
The universe just sent a signal that defies every known model
Considering what this signal might be, several hypotheses are on the table. The main one is that ASKAP J1832-0911 is an exotic type of magnetar, nothing more than the incredibly dense core of a dead star, with magnetic fields trillions of times stronger than Earth’s. Another idea is that it’s a binary system, where a supermagnetized star interacts with a companion.
However, we have a job to do: none of these explanations account for everything. The exact timing, the dual emission (radio and X-ray), and the stable repeating pattern don’t fit current models. Wang even comments:
“The discovery of its transient X-ray emission opens fresh insights into their mysterious nature.”
So, what’s left for us now is for scientists to look for other similar signals using pairs of telescopes (one for radio, one for X-rays), as this could reveal clues that a single detection alone could never provide. Perhaps they could use the James Webb Space Telescope, which just detected more than 800,000 galaxies in the darkness.
