Whether normal people prefer to accept it or not, our planet floats around in space in the middle of the unknown. Astronomers had been well-aware of that for many decades. But even so, there are plenty of scientific discoveries that amaze them as well.
One of those discoveries is represented by the detection of a mysterious and repeating radio signal coming from our own Milky Way galaxy. According to ScienceAlert.com, the signal could even be one of the rarest cosmic objects that are known to astronomers.
GLEAM-X J162759.5−523504.3: a white dwarf radio pulsar?
GLEAM-X J162759.5−523504.3 is the name of the peculiar signal that keeps repeating itself. Jonathan Katz, an astrophysicist of Washington University at St. Louis, is now placing his bet that the signal could be a white dwarf radio pulsar.
The scientist explained as ScienceAlert.com quotes:
Since the early days of pulsar astronomy there has been speculation that a rotating magnetic white dwarf might show pulsar-like activity,
The recently discovered periodic radio transient GLEAM-X J162759.5−523504.3 is a candidate for the first true white dwarf pulsar. It has a period of 18.18 minutes (1091 s) and its pulses show low frequency (72–215 MHz) emission with a brightness temperature ∼ 1016 K implying coherent emission. It has no binary companion with which to interact. It thus meets the criteria of a classical pulsar, although its period is hundreds of times longer than any of theirs.
It’s not the first time at all when astronomers are detecting mysterious signals coming from space. Some hope that one day, such a signal will represent a way that intelligent and alien life forms are trying to “wave” at us. But that wasn’t the case until now, and maybe just because the Universe is far too large for anything to travel between two intelligent life forms.
The new study paper was uploaded to the preprint server arXiv.