U.S. Naval Research Laboratory helps

By U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

WASHINGTON

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s Very Large Array (VLA)Low-bandIonosphereandTransient Experiment(VLITE)telescopehashelped astronomersconfirmfindingsofanewstellar phenomenon that challenges current scientific understanding of the physics of neutron stars The object is believed to be an ultra-long period magnetar, a rare type of star with extremely strong magnetic fields that can produce powerful bursts of energy, a finding that was published today in Nature.

NRL’s VLITE was developed in collaboration with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in 2014. VLITE operates on the VLA as a stand-alone instrument for ionospheric and astrophysical studies VLITE’s 18 antennas collect over 6000 hours of data per year which are archived at NRL. Originally it was implemented to constantly monitor the Earth’s ionosphere tostudydisturbancesthatcanaffectitsuch asgeomagneticstorms,seismiceventsand gravitywaves.Bythisconstantsurveillance, it can be used as a tool to detect transient blips, bursts of radio waves from cosmic sources that are elusive without constant observation.Understandingthesephenomenamayleadastronomerstoabetterunderstanding of the Universe

In September 2022, an international teamofastronomers,ledbyCurtinUniversityandtheInternationalCentreforRadio AstronomyResearch(ICRAR)inAustralia discovered the stellar object (named GPM J1839-10) using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) The discovery set off an intense world-wide effort to understand GPM J1839-10 NRL astronomers quickly reprocessedstoredVLITEdata,identifying previously hidden emission from the stellar object. Armed with the VLITE results, astronomers scoured archives and traced the emission from the source back more than three decades to 1988

“Thisenigmaticobjecthasbeenhidingin thedatafordecades wejustdidnotknow we had to look for it until its discovery by the MWA”, said Dr Simona Giacintucci,