Mysterious radio pulses are coming from somewhere scientists have never seen before.
A decade ago, astronomers have been catching a blast of radio emissions that come to 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.
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.
