The unexpected signal traveled about 16,000 light years to reach Earth.
An international team of astronomers, including scientists from the University of Manchester and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and the University of Sydney in Australia, published a new study in the journal Nature Astronomy on the detection of mysterious radio signals. It comes from a neutron star that reaches our planet from a distance of 16,000 light years and can be registered at different points in our galaxy.
“Recently, we discovered a radio transient unlike anything astronomers had seen before. Not only does it have a cycle of nearly an hour (the longest ever detected), but over the course of several observations it sometimes shows long, bright flashes, sometimes fast, weak pulses, and sometimes nothing at all. “We found that there was no,” the researchers said. Authors of the study.
The signal name is ASKAP J1935+2148. The numbers indicate their location in the sky. The radio transient was discovered using the ASKAP radio telescope, owned by the Australian government agency CSIRO, in the west of the country.
Astronomers operating it realized they were receiving a radio signal with an exact periodicity of 53.8 minutes.
“It belongs to a relatively new class of long-period radio transients. Only two have been discovered yet, and ASKAP J1935+2148’s period of 53.8 minutes is the longest,” the scientists noted.
“This material could re-evaluate our decades-old understanding of neutron stars, or white dwarfs, especially how they emit radio waves and their population in our galaxy,” the study authors concluded.
