Mysterious radio signals are coming from ‘unprecedented’ part of space, scientists say

Mysterious radio pulses are coming from somewhere scientists have never seen before.

For a decade, something has been sending blasts of radio emissions towards us every two hours, roughly from the Big Dipper constellation.

But work over those years using multiple telescopes has finally revealed where they might be coming from. The long radio blasts appear to be emitted from a pair of dead stars, researchers believe.

Scientists believe the two stars – a red dwarf and a white dwarf – are in orbit around each other so tightly that their magnetic fields interact with each other. When they bump together, every two hours, it sends out a blast of radio signals.

Previously, astronomers had only traced such long radio pulses to neutron stars. But the new study suggests for the first time that they can come from the movement of stars that are locked together in a binary system, too.

Those pulses are short flashes of radio signals that can last anywhere between seconds and minutes. They are akin to – but slightly different from – fast radio bursts, a similar phenomenon that fascinates astronomers and still remains mysterious.

“The radio pulses are very similar to FRBs, but they each have different lengths,” Kilpatrick said. “The pulses have much lower energies than FRBs and usually last for several seconds, as opposed to FRBs which last milliseconds. There’s still a major question of whether there’s a continuum of objects between long-period radio transients and FRBs, or if they are distinct populations.”

The work is described in a new paper, ‘Sporadic radio pulses from a white dwarf binary at the orbital period’, published in the journal Nature Astronomy.