For ten years, Earth has been at the receiving end of mysterious radio emissions every two hours.
After more than a decade, the source of these signals has finally been identified, nearby the Big Dipper.
A new research paper published in Nature Astronomy points to a red dwarf and white dwarf star, which are orbiting so tightly that their magnetic fields are sending out radio signals whenever they collide, which is every two hours.
The discovery is surprising to scientists, who previously had only managed to attribute radio blasts to neutron stars.
Dr Iris de Ruiter, who led the study, said: ‘We worked with experts from all kinds of astronomical disciplines.
‘With different techniques and observations, we got a little closer to the solution step by step.’
Scientists have captured a special kind of radio signal from a galaxy that’s nearly 9 billion light-years away from the Earth.
The signal was not sent by aliens but was emitted from a star-forming galaxy called ‘SDSSJ0826+5630’, when the universe was only 4.9 billion years old.
What makes this radio signal special is that it’s at a specific wavelength known as the ’21 cm line’.
‘It’s the equivalent to a look-back in time of 8.8 billion years,’ said Arnab Chakraborty, a cosmologist and co-author of a study on the detection.
It was the first time this type of radio signal has been detected at such a massive distance.
In 2022, similar radio signals led scientists to the discovery of a neutron star unlike any previously found.
Strange-looking pulses which lasted about 300 milliseconds each were noticed by Manisha Caleb, a lecturer at the University of Sydney.
‘The flash had some characteristics of a radio-emitting neutron star. But this wasn’t like anything we’d seen before,’ she said.
A neutron star is the collapsed remains of a massive supergiant star. Apart from a black hole, they are the smallest and densest stellar objects known to man.
When they’re especially dense, they can be called pulsars – and often emit bursts of radio waves that we can pick up here on Earth.
It was found that the neutron star sent out pulses unlike anything seen before.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected].
For more stories like this, check our news page.
MORE: Blood moon 2025: How to see this week’s lunar eclipse
MORE: What a 3.5 billion-year-old meteor crater tells us about the Earth
MORE: Elon Musk disrupts 240 flights with SpaceX rocket explosion after spate of air disasters
