it’s on our lawn
I wouldn’t touch it.
What material is it made of?
To me, at first glance it appears to be some kind of filter system that is placed in a water line. But that is just my WAG.
On second glance, I agree with Mr. Nylock. Perhaps you should notify the police.
It kinda looks like a pipe bomb, honestly, but in that case why the string ?
Looks to me like somebody taped some lengths of metal plumbing tube together for some reason. Maybe as a weight or anchor for something ?
Looks like a kid made a fake bomb.
Whatever it is, it certainly appears to kill grass. 
Can you tell what the pieces are? I mean, it could be a bomb, but I’m going to go with a ‘nothing’ that probably fell of the back of someone’s pickup truck and ended up in your yard. It’s dusty and frayed and certainly doesn’t look like someone made it this morning.
If it were in my yard I’d probably pick it up.
I mean, you could call the police, but then you’ll have the bomb squad tearing up your yard over what’s probably nothing.
At least that’s my two cents.
Looks an awful lot like a pipe bomb to me, too. But I’m hardly an expert.
baileygrrrl,
Unless a plumber has been working at your house or a neighbor’s and you think they dropped it, then it’s safest to not pick it up but instead call the police.
The won’t tear up your yard unless the responding officer takes a look and gets worried. Then you should be worried, too. We check things like this regularly and your Police Department shouldn’t mind.
Don’t pick it up if you’re not sure it’s safe.
AZRob
City Cop
PS. best of luck and let us know what you find out 
Relax, lie down and look into the pipes.
You can see the pipe is empty.
My idea, if they are empty. Its just a hose joiner… The tape and rope and just holds it together and ties onto the truck, to stop it getting lost. Its just something self-made for a plumber (steam to unclog kitchen pipes.) , septic tank pumper, pest sprayer, carpet cleaner…
I can see a male-male and a male-female…looks like a universal hose joiner. 3 in 1.
At first glance, it looked big, but then I looked at the surrounding grass and realized that it’s probably quite small. Too small to be a pipe bomb.
Be nice if we could get some oblique angles or head on to see what type of ends are on there.
But, it’s certainly some home made tool. The rope makes me think it was attached to a bucket or something. Maybe for aloft work.
Are you looking at the wrong picture? You can’t see into the pipes at all.
It looks like a bit like a cable junction protector (or a cluster of three of them) - the sort of thing that gets clamped around repair joints in telephone or data cables to protect them from water when they are buried.
Have there been any workmen digging in the area recently?
There has been a lot of digging in the area lately. They replaced water mains on our street in the fall and now they are paving.
It looks to me like the outer casing is made from the bottom of a 2-liter bottle, which would rule out it being any manufactured functional device. But if that were the case, you would probably have recognized it as such in person.
Geocache?
I’m frankly a little amused that the overwhelming consensus is that it’s a bomb or dangerous.
Nobody said it was a bomb. Lots of us said it looks like a bomb. Because, you know, it does. You’ll note that nobody said, “… get everyone out of the house, NOW!”
I think Mangetout is very close. A better set of pictures would have helped greatly. There is barely enough resolution to make the basics out, and a couple of more angles would help work out the possible functions.
But, a few possible (hard to fully make out) things strike me. The ends of at least two of the cylinders look like they terminate in a screw fitting - one that looks a lot like a screw coaxial fitting rather than a water/fluid fitting. The other ends look like open cylinders, and whilst again might be pipe, look a lot to me like very low loss hard line coaxial cable shields.
The next clue is that there are three tied together, and one has the remains of some poly rope solidly tied to it. This looks a lot like the end of a bundle of three distribution quality coaxial cables that have been dragged somewhere, and this end cut off allowing the cables to be properly terminated in the final equipment. The screw terminations were probably used to test the cable (probably with a TDR) to ensure there were no issues, before the cables were finally installed.
Hard to judge the size, but maybe something like QR-860 coaxial cable. If there has been activity from a cable Internet company nearby this maybe a bit of waste. The bleaching and degradation of the poly rope suggests that it has been lying in the sun for some time.
My first thought was that it could be a few Estes model rocket motors taped together. Are any neighborhood kids into model rocketry?
My husband took a few pictures of it and went over to the local police station. They all had a look and agreed it was most likely nothing, but they sent an officer over to have a look. He said he thought it was some home made tool and took it away to dispose of it.