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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

Yes, that's the interesting scientific question. The PR person saw that and somehow got very excited! The reality is, this object will be placed in a database and people will probably follow it up, but not with high priority.

Astronomers have hundreds of years of experience in seeing things in the sky that couldn't be explained, and either were "entirely new thing we never saw before" (like pulsars) and even theorists suggesting looking for things that only got recognized once we knew what black holes were. This is common. I wouldn't describe it as mysterious, just unexpected.

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I'm unable to reply to your latest comment and must leave presently so I will reply here. I feel the perspective you've taken downplays things a bit.

The history of astronomy spans thousands of years, a high number of unusual observations will sure to have accumulated over time. But finding an unpredicted aspect of a previously unobserved class of objects is an exciting event carrying a relatively high amount of surprisal. The involved astronomers are clearly excited and being reserved with language is to be expected of formal papers. While not an astronomer, I find the resulting changes in observation patterns exciting to read about and look forward to learning about the unusual radiative properties of such magnetars.

Literally the last 200 hundred years of astronomy have been a series of "surprisal" that ended up being "part of the ouevre" 10 years later. Magnetars are a fairly niche area, as are neutron star in general.

Neutron stars are really surprising, actually, in the sense that their physics look like nothing we have on earth. We will probably be finding unexpected neutron stars and things like slow magnetars for quite some time.

I understand the problem of sensationalism but maybe you're downplaying this one too much? The object pulses at an unusual frequency that's never before been observed, that's something with high suprisal relative to what's known.

> We find that the source pulses every 18.18 min, an unusual periodicity that has, to our knowledge, not been observed previously.

The mysterious (as yet unexplained) aspect of it will require updating models's physics to account for its unusual emission properties. The lead researcher herself distinguished it from known types of objects and states "completely unexpected [object]...nobody thought would be able to produce this kind of emission".

I have no problem with the statement "completely unexpected that nobody thought would be able to produce this kind of emission".

Nothing is being downplayed; the history of astronomy is littered with events like this. If they get enough data and can explain it, astronomy will be updated slightly.

> Yes, that's the interesting scientific question.

One might even say it's a mystery at the moment.

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