did we receive a radio signal from space

Stock image of the Very Large Array radio observatory. And for the first half of 2022, we massively improved our detection techniques so we'd be ready to deal with the data and pick out these faint signals,' Hurley-Walker said. 'We used the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope to search ten thousand square degrees of our Milky Way galaxy twice a week, from June to September 2022. This object was only found after the astronomers began hunting for signals similar to GLEAM-XJ1627. 'That doesn't match the data for GLEAM-XJ1627 or GPMJ1839-10 either.' 'We're also considering a scenario where a highly magnetic white dwarf might be able to produce such radio waves, but we would not expect them to be so bright, and the two white dwarfs that we know that produce radio waves are spinning much faster (2 and 5 minutes) and are each orbiting with a companion star that seems to help them generate radio emission,' Hurley-Walker said. That's why the discovery has been published in Nature-our existing theories can't explain how a neutron star could produce this radio emission while spinning so slowly, let alone keep it up for decades.'Īnother suggestion that the astronomers have for what exactly GPMJ1839-10 could be is a very magnetic white dwarf star, which are the cores of collapsed stars that aren't massive enough to form neutron stars or black holes. 'This puts it below 'the death line,' which is our theoretical expectation of where neutron stars spin too slowly and are barely decelerating, and should stop producing radio waves.

'We have measured how much GPMJ1839-10 is slowing down and, to the limit of our measurement accuracy, it isn't,' Hurley-Walker said. Usually, neutron stars like pulsars and magnetars spin extremely quickly, and are slowing down, converting rotational energy to radio waves. And magnetars aren't normally active for decades, while GPMJ1839-10 has been producing radio pulses since at least 1988.' We saw no X-rays if it were a magnetar, we would expect to see them.

'We've observed it producing bright radio pulses while we simultaneously observed with XMM-Newton, a powerful X-ray space telescope. But GPMJ1839-10 really challenges that interpretation,' Hurley-Walker said. 'For GLEAM-XJ1627, we thought that this temporary radio emission might be a good fit to what we saw. The strange properties of GPMJ1839-10 don't quite match those of a usual magnetar, however. Magnetars are another type of neutron star. Stock image of a pulsar, a type of neutron star. This object strangely went quiet after three months of activity in 2018, with no signals being recorded from it since, and spurred on the search for other slow-spinning objects that ended up finding GPMJ1839-10.

This finding is the second time that astronomers have spotted a magnetar spinning much slower than usual: the first was named GLEAM-X J162759.5−523504.3, and was recorded emitting radio waves every 18 minutes. A handful (six out of the 30 known) occasionally produce radio emission for a few weeks to months at a time.' 'Magnetars are highly magnetic, young neutron stars, usually rotating once every one or two seconds, and they produce bright X-ray emission. 'This is absurdly slow,' Natasha Hurley-Walker, an astrophysicist at Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Australia, and co-author of the paper, told Newsweek. They are formed by the collapse of huge stars of around 10-25 times the mass of our sun. The astronomers think that this object may be a particularly slow-spinning magnetar, which are neutron stars with extremely powerful magnetic fields, usually around 12 miles in with a mass about 1.4 that of our sun. An artist’s impression of the ultra-long period magnetar-a rare type of star with extremely strong magnetic fields that can produce powerful bursts of energy.

Did we receive a radio signal from space