A strange object is sending radio signals through space and experts don't know why
Astronomers, including one from Edinburgh, have been left perplexed over a new type of cosmic phenomenon
Our understanding of space is ever-growing, but what lies beyond earth is so huge that astronomers often face stumbling blocks that prevent them from getting their head round just exactly what is going on beyond our planet.
This is what has happened over in Australia, where astronomers, including one from University of Edinburgh, have stumbled across a strange object that is emitting radio waves every two minutes - and they don't know why.
The object - a long-period transient (LPT) - is emitting pulses of radio waves and X-rays for two minutes every 44 minutes. LPTs are a relatively new class of astrophysical objects that are known to emit radio waves periodically.
This is unusually slow compared to most periodic radio objects.
However, this is the first time such objects have been detected in X-rays.
There is currently no clear explanation for what is causing the signals, or why they 'switch on' and 'switch off' at such long, regular and unusual intervals.
When the LPT is 'on,' it is so bright that the Milky Way gas is blocking out some of the radio light.
Explanations could be that the object is a magnetar - the core of a dead star with powerful magnetic fields - or a pair of stars in a binary system where one of the two is a highly magnetised white dwarf.
In other words, a low-mass star at the end of its evolution.
However, even those theories do not fully explain what is being seen up above.
Incredibly, the discovery could even hint at a new type of physics or new models of stellar evolution.
Astronomers from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) made the finding, which they hope may provide insights into what is behind other mysterious signals which have been spotted across the sky.
The team discovered the object by joining the dots between the radio signals with X-ray pulses detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which just happened to be observing the same part of the sky.
Dr Marcin Glowacki from the University of Edinburgh School's Institute for Astronomy was involved in the collaboration. He looked for hydrogen gas located between the LPT and Earth.
By detecting this gas within the LPT signal, he was able to place a lower limit on how far away this unusual object is, which was important to rule out a link with other objects in that part of the sky.
The investigation continues, but as of yet, there is no clear cut answer to what the curious entity is, and why it's doing what it's doing.
Back in Scotland, people should get ready to witness a phenomenon for themselves, as the Milky Way comes into view this month.
June means that Milky Way "Core Season" is here, according to NASA. This is the time of year when the Milky Way is visible as a faint band of hazy light arching across the sky all night.
Excitingly, the space agency has revealed exactly how and when best to catch a glimpse of it.
Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community!
Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today.
You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland.
No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team.
All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in!
If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'.
We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like.
To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Reuters
10 hours ago
- Reuters
NASA says no decision yet on whether next Boeing Starliner flight will carry crew
WASHINGTON, June 6 (Reuters) - The earliest Boeing's Starliner spacecraft could fly again is early 2026, NASA said on Friday, as it evaluates whether to put humans on board one year after propulsion system issues on the capsule forced its debut crew to stay on the International Space Station for roughly nine months.
The Herald Scotland
14 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
Inside the Edinburgh firm on a mission to end fuel poverty
Urban Tide is a data company focused on unlocking information to deliver targeted solutions to businesses looking to improve sustainability outcomes. The founders met while delivering an ambitious 'Future Cities' programme that made them realise combining datasets was the future of targeted decision-making, but that many barriers stood in the way. Now the 15-strong company is a key partner in a five-year research project looking to link health data with household data to improve children's health. Specifically, it's looking at preventing the respiratory problems caused by damp and mould in poorly insulated or poorly ventilated homes. It's led by Dr Olivia Swann who is both a paediatrician and a researcher at the University of Edinburgh. 'The work that Livvy [Dr Swann] is doing is pretty fascinating,' Tricker said. 'The UK has the leakiest homes in Europe. It's a combination of having a lot of old stock, the way we build them is not that efficient and we're not really considering the thermal efficiency of buildings. 'The retrofit programme at scale needs to really be ramped up because if we reduce energy, we reduce our bills and make our homes more comfortable. But – and here comes the but –there's a risk if you clad a home and make it nice and insulated, it's not well ventilated. If you don't consider the ventilation systems, you can increase the risk of mould build-up, which can then lead to the risk of black mould, which, if you've children in the house, can lead to an increase in asthma and a whole host of health implications for later life.' Thanks to Urban Tide's unique access to system data from electricity smart meters, it can provide the research team with information that uses AI and household-level information to predict the risk of fuel poverty. Added to this is the Scotland-wide health data, held securely and strictly anonymised, which Swann's team can overlay with the data provided by Tricker's team, as well as other advanced data sets. This research, inspired by the children coming into Dr Swann's clinic with respiratory infections, is only possible now that all the pieces of the data jigsaw are available. Currently, it would not be possible even over the border in England, and interest from partners has exceeded all Swann's expectations. 'I've been really overwhelmed not just with the amount of interest but also just how incredibly collaborative and how much goodwill there is from industry, from policymakers and from third sector,' Swann said. 'We arranged a project launch event and I thought it would be 20 people and some sandwiches. Instead, we had 130 people and 50 different organisations. Most of those people I had met on Zoom or Teams, and then they had come in person because they felt so strongly about this issue. I think that is a real testament to how important people think this issue is and the will for it to be better.' It's the Goldilocks analogy of 'just right' as it applies to the population of Scotland and the quality of the data, alongside the expertise of companies and researchers and the involvement of Scottish government in potentially turning this research into policy that inspires Tricker. 'We're always looking at how we can use data to help solve a number of these large societal challenges,' he said. "So we wanted to build a platform that could bring in real-time data,' he said. 'We work across the transport sector as well, because they collect lots of real-time information. By combining that with other static data sets, you can start to see patterns. 'In the transport sector, for example, we're working with Cycling Scotland and other partners across local authorities and regional transport partners to try and help put in infrastructure where it's needed.' With this research project involving so many datasets from different partners, including, for the first time, Scottish government data on every intervention made so far to make houses warmer, the ethics of data use have been a priority. 'This data could not be harder to bring together,' Swann said. 'All of the data goes into the National Safe Haven, which is incredibly well protected. The data is then linked there, and it's anonymised before we begin to access it. So we never know who anybody is. 'We have a fantastic patient and public engagement group too and a lot of the discussions we've had with them have been about the acceptability of using these different kinds of data, bringing them together and all of the security measures around them.' Tricker adds that the anonymity of the data Urban Tide is using is absolutely key. It is not interested in personal details but looking for patterns in usage so the right interventions can be made. It will shortly be launching which will open up the data it has collected on transport across Scotland, including cycling networks, so it can be used to make local and national decisions. 'I'm quite excited about launching to really showcase some of our AI technologies and obviously help to promote more open data generally as well,' he said. Urban Tide is already working internationally from its Edinburgh base. It is leading an open data training programme for Ireland's public sector to comply with a European directive to make public data more accessible, and the team is also working on smart city plans in the middle-east and Australia. After 11 years of organic growth, bootstrapping and pivoting as the technology and AI capabilities develop, it is now looking to raise some investment. Assisting with this is Mountside Ventures, which it sees as a 'badge of honour' as it selects a only handful of companies to work with each year. 'The next three years are about really consolidating the business and the technology that we've built across UK and Europe and the next round after that would be to expand into America. We're on the journey of the 'three I's, so there's the identification piece, then there's the intervention and then how do you measure impact? We are also cross-sector. It's one of the challenges of our business, having to work in the energy sector, the transport sector, and then combining data from across the different sources. 'But that's also the opportunity because as more data are being opened up and used, the convergence of all these different types of data really unlocks new opportunities.'
NBC News
18 hours ago
- NBC News
These cosmic monsters are creating the biggest explosions since the big bang
The vast emptiness of space is growing emptier one star at a time. That's because 80 billion lightyears from Earth, three cosmic beasts are devouring stars ten times the size of the sun. In a new study by the University of Hawaii, among others, astronomers scouring through NASA and European Space Agency's data said they had discovered three supermassive black holes. Those behemoths feast on stars of such a size that make the one at the center of the solar system look like a light snack. The explosions those scientists have recorded, which happened when those black holes shredded and sucked up the fabric of those stars, are the largest since the big bang that created the universe. 'What I think is so exciting about this work is that we're pushing the upper bounds of what we understand to be the most energetic environments of the universe,' Anna Payne, a staff scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a co-author of the study, said in the NASA article. Black holes are astronomical objects invisible to the human eye. They have a gravitational pull so strong that they swallow everything, including light. A supermassive black hole is the biggest of all black holes, sitting at the center of galaxies like the one at the heart of the Milky Way slowly sucking planets and all other matter toward it. When a star gets trapped in the pull of a supermassive black hole, it can disintegrate with a spectacular explosion in a cosmic event that scientists in a new study published this week in the journal Science Advances call 'extreme nuclear transient.' 'These events are the only way we can have a spotlight that we can shine on otherwise inactive massive black holes,' University of Hawaii graduate student Jason Hinkle said in a separate NASA article. Hinkle is the lead author of the new study that describes for the first time two such events that took place over the past decade. Two of the three supermassive black holes were detected in 2016 and 2018 by an ESA mission and are documented for the first time in the study. The third, nicknamed 'Barbie' because of its catalog identifier ZTF20abrbeie, was identified in 2020 by a Caltech observatory in California and subsequently documented in 2023. The blasts are so powerful that the only cosmic event larger in magnitude has been the big bang that sparked the dawn of the universe. Unlike in other stellar explosions, though, the way X-ray, optical light and ultraviolet rays dimmed and brightened in these incidents made it clear this event was a 'black hole ripping a star apart,' the NASA article said. NASA says black holes actually brighten during these cosmic events and that brightness lasts for several months. That brightness has given scientists a new way to find more black holes in the early distant universe. When astronomers peer into space, they are looking back in time because the further away they look, the older the light is reaching them — the light reaching Earth from the sun, for example, is eight minutes old. 'We can take these three objects as a blueprint to know what to look for in the future,' Payne said.
