A telescope that’s a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array in SA has helped a group of scientists discover something very unusual: the core of a collapsed star that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour.

It is unlike anything spotted by astronomers before, and has given the global science community a taste of what the SKA could uncover.

The team who discovered it think it could be a neutron star or a white dwarf with an ultra-powerful magnetic field...