2023-07-20 10:16:00
Long radio signals emanating from an unidentified source in space have been picked up regularly since at least 1988. A discovery that upsets scientific models.
An unknown source in space has been sending long radio signals to Earth for at least 35 years, say scientists in an article published Wednesday in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. The characteristics of these signals do not correspond to any of the explanatory models developed by scientists to date, specifies, relates The Independent.
Particularly long signals
This source was recently identified, but archival analyzes have shown that signals of the same type ranging up to 21 minutes at varying intensity have been regularly captured since at least 1988.
They might be compared to signals emanating from pulsars or “fast radio bursts”, but these sources usually emit radio waves that last between a few milliseconds and several seconds.
Pulsars are neutron stars that rotate on their axis at very high speed, emitting radio waves through this movement. Radio “bursts” correspond to anomalies in radio frequency readings from space. In both cases, emissions lasting several minutes were never recorded.
The trail of a white dwarf
If the emitting object is a pulsar, then it would come out of the models hitherto accepted by the scientific community, even behaving in a way that the experts had hitherto thought impossible.
The astrophysicists who work on these data also evoke the hypothesis of a “white dwarf” type star or a “magnetar”, a star whose magnetic field is particularly strong. The emissions that this type of object usually sends, however, are different from the signals recently identified.
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