Science
Astronomers Trace Decade-long Mystery Radio Signals To Binary Star System 1,600 Light-Years Away
After nearly ten years, the source of mysterious radio signals in space has finally been determined.
Astronomers have been seeing odd radio signals coming from space every two hours for the past ten years.
Unfortunately, in this case, scientists have already ruled out aliens.
The true cause, however, is still quite fascinating.
The signals come from a red dwarf and a white dwarf star that orbit each other so closely that their magnetic fields collide and emit radio waves, per a recent study published in Nature Astronomy. This occurs roughly every 125 minutes.
It was discovered that these signals, identified as ILTJ1101, originated close to the Big Dipper, a cluster of stars in the Ursa Major constellation. It is about 1,600 light years away from Earth.
This discovery is somewhat revolutionary because, up until now, scientists have only connected radio bursts to neutron stars known as magnetars.
“We worked with experts from all kinds of astronomical disciplines,” said Dr. Iris de Ruiter, who led the research.
“With different techniques and observations, we got a little closer to the solution step by step.”
The researchers think that other enigmatic space signals could eventually be identified as binary systems similar to this one.
Similarly, in 2022, scientists discovered 300 ms radio pulses that led them to a unique neutron star that had never been observed before.
The first person to observe these odd pulses was Dr. Manisha Caleb, a lecturer at the University of Sydney.
“The flash had some characteristics of a radio-emitting neutron star. But this wasn’t like anything we’d seen before,” she said.
The smallest and densest stellar objects ever found are neutron stars, which are the collapsing remnants of gigantic supergiant stars.
One kind of neutron star is a pulsar, which spins and emits regular, repeating radio pulses.
Although the origins of these slow, steady pulses remain unclear, scientists are observing a growing number of “fast radio bursts” (FRBs).
“The radio pulses are very similar to FRBs, but they each have different lengths,” stated Dr. Charles Kilpatrick, a co-author of the study from Northwestern University.
“The pulses have much lower energies than FRBs and usually last for several seconds, as opposed to FRBs which last milliseconds.”
The Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), the largest radio telescope operating at the lowest frequencies, is one of the enormous optical telescopes that researchers have obtained access to in order to better understand the origin of these pulses. Then, in 2015, Dr. de Ruiter combed over the archive data for the same region of the sky and found pulses like the ‘flash of a torch’ coming to Earth.
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