This object strangely went quiet after three months of activity in 2018, with no signals being recorded from it since, and spurred on the search for other slow-spinning objects that ended up finding GPMJ1839-10.

This finding is the second time that astronomers have spotted a magnetar spinning much slower than usual: the first was named GLEAM-X J162759.5−523504.3, and was recorded emitting radio waves every 18 minutes. A handful (six out of the 30 known) occasionally produce radio emission for a few weeks to months at a time.' 'Magnetars are highly magnetic, young neutron stars, usually rotating once every one or two seconds, and they produce bright X-ray emission. 'This is absurdly slow,' Natasha Hurley-Walker, an astrophysicist at Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Australia, and co-author of the paper, told Newsweek. They are formed by the collapse of huge stars of around 10-25 times the mass of our sun. The astronomers think that this object may be a particularly slow-spinning magnetar, which are neutron stars with extremely powerful magnetic fields, usually around 12 miles in with a mass about 1.4 that of our sun. An artist’s impression of the ultra-long period magnetar-a rare type of star with extremely strong magnetic fields that can produce powerful bursts of energy.