A mysterious object, unlike the world, has ever seen, is unleashing massive bursts of energy every 20 minutes and hides in our galactic backyard.
Astrophysicist Natasha Hurley-Walker discovered the "spooky" object in late 2020 when she and her colleagues were scanning radio signals across the cosmos.
"It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there's nothing known in the sky that does that," Natasha Hurley-Walker, an astronomer at Curtin University and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Australia, told NBC News. The research was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
"This object was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our observations.
"The occurrences have been seen before — usually as very quick events that flash on and off within seconds or milliseconds or as longer pulses that last days — but radio transients hadn't previously been detected appearing and disappearing over a few hours," Hurley-Walker said.
The object is probably a neutron star or, as some astronomers call it, a "dead" star because it has run out of fuel and collapsed.
She said the object is about "4,000 lightyears away," which is "really quite close to us" considered to be "in our galactic backyard."
Another student researching the mysterious object from Curtin University, Tyrone O'Doherty, said, "somehow it's converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we've seen before."
Whatever the mystery object is, so far, doesn't appear to be an alien spaceship heading to planet Earth on an invasion mission -- something left-leaning Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman theorized half a decade ago could be what the global economy needs to unleash a wave of fiscal stimulus (COVID did that).
Maybe with the US economy on the cusp of a recession, if the Federal Reserve embarks on an aggressive rate hike cycle, an alien invasion and or even war with Russia are some of the excuses to unleash another wave of fiscal stimulus.
