Once again it has happened: a team of scientists It has finished detecting a radio wave signal that comes from a point light years from our planet. No one knows what it is for sure, but there seems to be a firm theory.
For years, if not decades, the scientific community and space scholars have devoted themselves to studying the curious phenomenon of Fast Bursts of Radio Waves (FBR).
A situation that is repeated more and more or that we are able to detect more frequently, even sometimes by mere and absolute chance. As has happened in the case that concerns us today.
The spectrum observed by telescopes from Earth today constantly picks up radio signals. And it all depends on the stellar region with which they interact and the gases with which they are related.
These devices are becoming more powerful and precise, so their analysis and detection capacity naturally increases.
The mystery of scientists and the radio wave 4 thousand light years from Earth
Now, in a recent study published in the latest issue of Naturerecounts the adventure of radio astronomer Natasha Hurley-Walker and her team of students.
Who ended up hunting for an FBR radio wave signal while doing another project that was completely unrelated, collecting data from GaLactic and Extragalactic All-Sky MWA eXtended (GLEAM-X).
This data map on the qualities of the sky collects all kinds of information captured by one of the most sensitive radio telescopes on Earth.
So by taking all that pile of numbers the team of scientists was able to detect a radio wave coming from space with regular pulsations running on a cycle of 18 minutes and 18 seconds:
“By measuring the dispersion of the radio pulses with respect to frequency, we have located the source within our own Galaxy and suggest that it could be an ultra-long period magnetar.
No one believed that we were going to directly detect one like this because we didn’t expect them to be that bright; somehow it’s converting magnetic energy into radio waves much more efficiently than anything we’ve seen before.”
The point is that this phenomenon was detected and maintained for a period of three months, from January to March 2018, but then out of nowhere it disappeared.
The study estimates that the origin would have been a white dwarf with a very powerful magnetic field, enough to be detected at a distance of 4,000 light-years from Earth.
Or failing that, it could be an ultra-long period magnetar and enough neutrons to generate that magnetic field.
But the concrete reality may never be known.