Scientists report the discovery of a new long-period transient, ASKAP J144834-685644. In addition to its duration of approximately 1.5 hours, it is interesting because it can be identified in all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Long-period transient
An international team of scientists in an article recently published on the arXiv preprint server reports the discovery of a new long-period transient ASKAP J144834-685644 (abbreviated ASKAP J1448-6856). And it really is a mysterious source of the signal.
Astronomers have long been dealing not only with stars that have been shining in the sky for thousands of years, but also with short-lived events that appear and disappear. They are called transients. Some of them repeat, but usually the interval between them is a few seconds or milliseconds.
Long transients, lasting from several minutes to several hours, are a relatively new phenomenon. Its source remains a mystery to astronomers. Most likely, they are magnetars or magnetic white dwarfs, but no one knows for sure.
Mysterious source
The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope helped scientists discover ASKAP J1448-6856. It consists of 36 antennas that work together in the 700 to 1800 MHz range. It is specifically designed to search for radio transients, and it was used to find a strange source whose signal combined linear and circular polarization.
However, that is not the most interesting thing about ASKAP J1448-6856. It is one of the few transients observed across the entire wavelength range from X-ray to radio. And in the visible range as well.
There are very few such transients, and scientists are still trying to figure out which objects are behind them. According to the article, multi-wavelength simulation of the spectral energy distribution (SED) of ASKAP J1448-6856, combined with its radio properties, suggests that it may be a system of two white magnetic dwarfs with a magnetic field close to the edge of 1000 Gauss.
However, the authors of the study do not rule out the possibility that ASKAP J1448-6856 could be an isolated pulsating white dwarf or a millisecond pulsar.
According to phys.org
