Australia: Who is Tyrone O' Doherty, a 20-year-old student who discovered a 'mysterious' object in the galaxy?

This image of the galaxy taken from Earth shows the part
where this 'mysterious' object was seen

When Tyrone Odoherty joined Australia's International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) as an undergraduate student, her primary goal was to design a computer program to help investigate radio waves in the universe.

But instead, in November 2020, they spotted an unknown object orbiting our galaxy. After months of research, the discovery was finally announced in a study published in the scientific journal Nature this January.

O' Doherty, 22, told the source: "I was just trying to write some code and I really didn't expect anything so interesting."

"And it helped me to graduate with honors, so no complaints," he says with a laugh.

When scientists examined it carefully, they said that they saw a rain of radio waves every 18 minutes, which lasted for a minute.

It is not uncommon to hear of bodies emitting energy into space, but Australian scientists claim that it was a strange thing to be activated for a minute and then stopped.

The team of experts says they are trying to understand the mystery.

Speaking in Perth, Australia, O' Doherty said he intended to develop a technique that could detect "transient" objects in space, which appear to be burning. They had a long list of potential candidates but could not find them.

Now they are being credited with finding something that the ICRAR team claims is "never seen before" and is a "mysterious" discovery for astronomers.

What is this thing?

O' Doherty was only 20 years old when the object was discovered. According to him, there are two theories about what could happen.

One of them is that it is a white dwarf. The term is commonly used to refer to the remains of a collapsing star.

Another theory is that it could be a magnetar, a type of neutron star that is thought to have a very strong magnetic field.

"But the way things are moving has puzzled astronomers," says O' Doherty. It emits a continuous burst of radio energy for a full minute every 18 minutes.

There are huge energy-consuming things in the universe, but something that only turns on for a minute is very unusual. The time between each burst is also very unusual. So this may be a completely new universal thing.