Object found in the Milky Way 'unlike anything astronomers have seen'
SYDNEY: Australian researchers have discovered a strange spinning object in the Milky Way they say is unlike anything astronomers have ever seen. The object, first spotted by a university student working on his undergraduate thesis, releases a huge burst of radio energy three times every hour. The pulse comes "every 18.18 minutes, like clockwork," said astrophysicist Natasha Hurley-Walker, who led the investigation after the student's discovery, using a telescope in the Western Australian outback known as the Murchison Widefield Array. While there are other objects in the universe that switch on and off such as pulsars Hurley-Walker said 18.18 minutes is a frequency that has never been observed before. Finding this object was "kind of spooky for an astronomer," she said, "because there's nothing known in the sky that does that." The research team is now working to understand what they have found. Trawling back through years of data, they