A strange cosmic object known as the “Blinking Unicorn” has captured the attention of astronomers. It was discovered emitting bizarre bursts of radio waves from deep within the Milky Way.
Officially known as CHIME J1634+44, this rare object is unlike anything scientists have seen before — and it’s forcing a major rethink of how dead stars behave.
The Blinking Unicorn: A Rare Cosmic Oddity
Astronomers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) recently announced the discovery of CHIME J1634+44, affectionately nicknamed the Blinking Unicorn due to its rare and mysterious characteristics.
This spinning dead star emits pulsing radio transmissions, which is a typical behavior of pulsars, but the object itself breaks almost every rule associated with known pulsars.
“You could call CHIME J1634+44 a ‘unicorn’, even among other LPTs,” said Fengqiu Adam Dong of Green Bank Observatory, the lead author on one of the published papers.
This strange star is located several thousand light-years away and exhibits an overlapping dual pulse period: every 841 seconds (about 14 minutes) and a secondary pulse every 4,206 seconds (70 minutes)—exactly five times the shorter cycle. Even more unusually, its spin is speeding up rather than slowing down, an anomaly that baffles current models.
Long-Period Transients and Extreme Polarization
CHIME J1634+44 belongs to a very rare class known as long-period transients (LPTs) — stars that emit periodic bursts of light over unusually long timescales. Only a dozen or so LPTs have been discovered in our galaxy, and this one might be the most unique of all.
