Two Wisconsin researchers part of global team that discovered a new object in space
When students open their science textbooks in the future, there's a chance they'll be reading about a cosmic discovery made by scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Their discovery "may hold the key to unlocking a new kind of star that we don't yet understand," said UWM physics professor David Kaplan.
Kaplan and others, including Akash Anumarlapudi, a recent UWM doctoral graduate, were part of a global team that discovered an unknown object emitting both radio waves and X-rays. This is the first time an object in this class has been detected using X-rays, which may help astronomers find and research more of these objects in the future.
ASKAP J1832-0911, the unknown space object that the global team of astronomers first spotted in December 2023, is categorized as a long-period transient. LPTs are a new and rare group of cosmic objects discovered in 2022.
Ziteng "Andy" Wang, member of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research and associate lecturer at the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy in Australia, was another researcher involved in the discovery.
After the object was initially spotted in 2023, Kaplan said, Wang spent the next year and a half finding radio telescopes across the world that could point to the area of the sky in which the object was located.
Kaplan, who was among nearly 50 researchers directly involved with the project, explained the significance of the discovery.
'It'll still take more study, more observations, more mass to really understand this object and all of its related friends, but it's a lot of fun to think that you are one of the first people to find one of these and to study it and just figure out how weird the universe really is," Kaplan said.
Kaplan explained that the techniques used to find LPTs are the same as those used to train advanced computer intelligence models used for security research, TikTok algorithms and more. He said a number of people who are interested in astronomy learn these techniques but go on to make careers in technology at companies like Facebook or Google.
'We're looking to inspire the next generation of everybody who finds interesting questions and wants to figure out how to answer them on their own.'
David Kaplan, physics professor
"We're not just looking to inspire the next generation of astronomers,' Kaplan said. 'We're looking to inspire the next generation of everybody who finds interesting questions and wants to figure out how to answer them on their own.'
The human eye can see only a tiny fraction of the universe, Kaplan said. Without a carefully designed experiment and special telescopic equipment, light forms like ultraviolet X-rays and gamma rays are difficult to identify.
'When you look up at the sky at night, you can be overwhelmed by the number of stars out there,' Kaplan said. 'But unless you look at them in real detail, you might not notice that some of them are actually changing.'
The research project sought to look at the universe through "radio eyes" to find out which cosmic objects were changing, Kaplan explained.
Kaplan said 90%-95% of the time researchers were watching for the object, it wasn't actually visible. This is because the object rarely "blinks," only pulsing for two minutes every 44 minutes.
A human would never be able to observe this kind of object by looking up into the sky just once, Kaplan said. He compared it to a lighthouse that's lit up for only a few minutes every hour.
'You have to get really lucky in order to see this flashing. And then we had to get even luckier — we accidentally discovered it flashing the X-rays as well as radio,' Kaplan said. 'This whole project is really luck, piled on luck, piled on luck.'
The global researchers, along with astronomers from ICRAR, made their discovery using a radio telescope in Australia. The telescope is on a desolate, million-acre farm to avoid man-made noise from cell phones and satellites, Kaplan explained.
At first, the team saw nothing when looking at the object through an optical telescope and X-ray telescope.
Then, through NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, Wang found that a Chinese research group had coincidentally pointed a telescope in the same area of the sky. The group discovered the same information as Kaplan and Wang, and both teams put out papers documenting their findings.
Wang served as an author of the team's paper, which was published May 28 in the science journal Nature.
Anumarlapudi and Kaplan, from Milwaukee, analyzed radio telescope data, calculated and contributed to the journal publication. Kaplan also helped lead the research team that discovered the object.
The nearly 50 global researchers who made up the research team came primarily from the U.S. and Australia, with others from Italy, Spain, China and Israel.
Contact Mia Thurow at mthurow@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee scientists help discover space object ASKAP J1832-0911
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