If aliens were to contact Earth, what would it sound like? Such a scenario has been imagined countless times in science fiction but in reality we have no proof extraterrestrials even exist. That hasn't dampened the excitement that an advanced civilisation might be out there, however, and the discovery of a mysterious stellar object which emits a five-minute pulse every 22 minutes will only serve to intensify that. What's more, the scientists who detected it aren't 100 per cent sure what it is. An international team of astronomers led by Australia's Curtin University think it could be an ultra-long period magnetar -- a rare type of star with the most powerful known magnetic fields in the universe.

Young isolated neutron stars (INS) most commonly manifest themselves as rotationally powered pulsars (RPPs) which involve conventional radio pulsars as well as gamma-ray pulsars (GRPs) and rotating radio transients (RRATs). Some other young INS families manifest themselves as anomalous X-ray pulsars (AXPs) and soft gamma-ray repeaters (SGRs) which are commonly accepted as magnetars, i.e.\ magnetically powered neutron stars with decaying super-strong fields. Yet some other young INS are identified as central compact objects (CCOs) and X-ray dim isolated neutron stars (XDINs) which are cooling objects powered by their thermal energy. Older pulsars, as a result of a previous long episode of accretion from a companion, manifest themselves as millisecond pulsars and more commonly appear in binary systems. We use Dirichlet process Gaussian mixture model (DPGMM), an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, for analyzing the distribution of these pulsar families in period $P$ and period derivative $\dot{P}$ parameter space. We compare the average values of the characteristic age, magnetic dipole field strength, surface temperature and proper motion of all discovered components. We verify that DPGMM is robust and provides hints for inferring relations between different classes of pulsars. We discuss the implications of our findings for the magnetothermal spin evolution models and fallback discs.