Space's Spinning Enigma: A ‘Unicorn’ Object Defies Astrophysics
upstart writes:
Astronomers have made a groundbreaking discovery using some of the world's most advanced radio telescopes. Researchers, led by Fengqiu Adam Dong, a Jansky Fellow at the NSF Green Bank Observatory (NSF GBO), have identified an exceptionally unusual cosmic object known as a Long Period Radio Transient (LPT), named CHIME J1634+44. This object stands out as one of the most polarized LPTs ever discovered, and it is the only one observed to be spinning up (meaning its rotation is speeding up) a phenomenon never seen before in this class of astronomical objects.
[...] "You could call CHIME J1634+44 a 'unicorn', even among other LPTs," said Dong, noting this LPT's particularly unusual traits. Despite hundreds of detections across multiple observatories, including those listed above, and additional observations by the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) in the Netherlands, the timing of the repeating radio bursts from CHIME J1634+44 is unclear. "The bursts seem to repeat either every 14 minutes, or 841 seconds-but there is a distinct secondary period of 4206 seconds, or 70 minutes, which is exactly five times longer. We think both are real, and this is likely a system with something orbiting a neutron star," explained Dong.
Normally, objects like neutron stars or white dwarfs slow down over time because they lose energy, so their spin period gets longer. But for CHIME J1634+44, the period is actually getting shorter-meaning it's spinning up, not slowing down. The only way to make the timing of the bursts fit together is to assume this spin-up is real, but that doesn't make sense for a lone star. Therefore, researchers believe that CHIME J1634+44 might actually be two stars orbiting each other very closely. If the orbit of this binary system is shrinking, it could be because they are losing energy, by emitting gravitational waves or interacting with each other, which could make it look like the period is getting shorter. This kind of shrinking orbit has been seen in other close pairs of white dwarfs. The radio bursts from CHIME J1634+44 are 100% circularly polarized, which means the radio waves twist in a perfect spiral as they travel-which is extremely rare. No known neutron star or white dwarf has ever been seen to do this for every burst. This suggests that the way these radio waves are being produced is different from what we see in all other known objects.
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