SYDNEY -- An international team of astronomers has uncovered a rare cosmic object emitting both radio waves and X-rays, shedding new light on one of the universe's enduring mysteries.

The Western Australia-based International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) said in a release on Wednesday that the object, named ASKAP J1832-0911, emits bursts of energy for two minutes every 44 minutes, a pattern never before observed in both radio and X-ray wavelengths.

Discovered by the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope in Western Australia, which was owned by the national science agency Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, and matched with data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the object is classified as a long-period transient (LPT), a class of mysterious sources first identified in 2022, the release said.

This marks the first time such a transient has been detected in X-rays, it said, adding that only 10 LPTs have been discovered so far by astronomers across the world, and scientists are still baffled by the objects' unusually regular and prolonged bursts of energy.

Finding this was like "finding a needle in a haystack," said the study's lead author Wang Ziteng from Curtin University and ICRAR.

"The ASKAP radio telescope has a wide field view of the night sky, while Chandra observes only a fraction of it. So, it was fortunate that Chandra observed the same area of the night sky at the same time," Wang said.

ASKAP J1832-0911 may be a magnetar, a neutron star with an extremely strong magnetic field, or a magnetized white dwarf in a binary system, but neither theory fully explains its behavior, he said, adding this discovery could point to new types of stellar evolution or even new physics.

The dual detection in both radio and high-energy X-rays provides a critical clue, helping astronomers refine theories about these mysterious objects and potentially uncover more examples, said the study newly published in Nature.

"Finding one such object hints at the existence of many more. The discovery of its transient X-ray emission opens fresh insights into their mysterious nature," said Nanda Rea, the study's co-author from Spain's Institute of Space Science.