Scientists are baffled by a mysterious radio signal that was found to be turning on and off roughly every 20 minutes for the last three decades.
It was found that the signal was composed of pulses that lasted five minutes each and were separated by 17 minutes. They discovered that the mysterious object that was releasing the signal looked a lot like a pulsar but was spinning 1,000 times slower.
Mysterious Object Pulsing Radio Signal
What really surprised experts was when they searched for the oldest radio observations in the part of the sky where the mysterious signal was coming from. The Very Large Array located in New Mexico, United States, is known for having the longest-running archive of data relevant to the study.
Scientists found pulses from the source in archived data from every year that they looked at, with the oldest one being in an observation that was made in 1988. Having three decades-worth of data meant that they were able to time the pulses. They found that the source was pulsing the signal every 1,318.1957 seconds, give or take a tenth of a millisecond, as per The Conversation.
Current theories surmise that in order for the source to be producing consistent radio signals, it should be slowing down. However, recent observations have found that it was not, in fact, slowing down.
In a study published in the journal Nature, scientists showed that the source lies just below what is called the "death line." It is the theoretical limit of how neutron stars generate radio waves and is true for even some of the complex magnetic field models.
Additionally, if the mysterious source turns out to be a magnetar, the radio emissions should only be visible to use for a few months to years and not 33 years and counting. This means that in solving one mystery, scientists were left with another.
But with more questions than answers, scientists are hopeful that they will be able to gather more data and theorize what the source actually is if they are able to acquire more data from similar objects from across the universe, according to Ars Technica.
Consistent Throughout 33 Years of Emission
However, the difficult thing is finding these objects because they are very difficult to observe using current technology. The length of the pulses, which is up to 300 seconds, along with the gap between the bursts, mean that short-cadence observations will likely show either something there the entire time, or nothing at all.
The team that studied the mysterious source was led by astrophysicist Natasha Hurley-Walker of the Curtin University of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Australia.
She noted that the discovery of the object and its consistent pulses challenge scientists' understanding of neutron stars and magnetars, which are already considered some of the most exotic and extreme objects in the universe.
The latest discovery also comes after a similar object was found in 2018, called GLEAM-XJ162759.5-523504.3. Scientists recorded this particular object pulsing radio waves for roughly a minute every 18 minutes. Experts theorized that based on the way that the light was twisted during observations, it could have been found in a highly magnetized environment, said Science Alert.
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