What’s Sending These Mystery Signals From 4,000 Lightyears Away?
A mysterious repeating radio signal from space has been detected that scientists have not seen before. What or who is sending this signal?
Scientists have detected a radio signal from somewhere out in deep space some 4,000 light-years away.
The signal pulsed every 18 minutes and 18 seconds, for 30 to 60 seconds — every time, 18 minutes and 18 seconds. It did this for three months then it stopped. Scientists assume it is a naturally occurring rotating object that, like a lighthouse shining its beacon, will send what appears to be a repeating signal.
But Natasha Hurley-Walker, whose study into this repeating signal was recently published in the journal Nature told Vice, “[T]here are no models that produce such bright radio emission from two objects in orbit with each other, with such precision, and any that would produce any kind of radio waves would also produce X-ray emission, which we don’t see.”
Some think this might be coming from a highly magnetized star called a magnetar. So what does this all mean? Astronomer and Gaia News contributor Marc D’Antonio weighed in on the subject.
“Maybe this strange signal is some weird kind of magnetar that is rotating, but we’re not used to seeing it rotate every 18 minutes, that means a rather slow rotation. So, this is kind of weird, it’s something that doesn’t match any model that we know, and I think it takes us down a new research path to try to figure out just what it is we’re looking at,” D’Antonio said.
If this signal is not from some type of dead star, what else could it be?
“There is a remote chance, the far remote one, that it’s a techno-signature, maybe. Now, what’s a techno-signature? It’s a signature from something that’s intelligent that’s beaming out something,” D’Antonio said.
“Now, (with) repeating bursts like this we always err on the side of caution and say, ‘[W]ell the universe rotates, everything rotates,’ so, therefore, it could be something rotating and flashing a hot side toward us that has this signal in it like a hotspot. So it could even be something that’s a techno-signature that’s intelligent or it could be a naturally occurring strange kind of exotic star — a magnetar — something along those lines. It’s really odd, you know? Where would it come from? What is the origin of this? How does a star like this form if it’s a star from a supernova? There are really no models that show us how something like this forms. It is really perplexing, and therefore, really exciting.
What about the pulse itself, could there be data within that could be studied?
“The information inside the pulse is something that would be interesting to look at. Was it sending out something specifically? Was it sending a message saying, ‘[T]hey’re coming to you, get off your planet,’ or whatever, I don’t know,” D’Antonio said.
“But I do know that that’s something interesting and I’m sure that no one is really looking inside the pulses to examine the exact nature. Sure they are looking at the signal and what it’s doing, but the signal that’s coming is not like it’s blowing off the airwaves, it’s a very faint signal. But the strangeness isn’t how it’s pulsing, the strangeness is in why it stopped, and the strangeness is in the duration. This is all new, every 18 minutes it would pulse, and it was 18 minutes 18 seconds. That was a very strange pulsation period and as quick as it came, it was gone, and it stopped — and no one knows why it stopped.”
What does this discovery mean for the big picture future of astronomy?
“It’s these one-time things you see that are really exciting because we could be on the cusp of some other kind of discovery. Either way, we are, we are on the cusp of another discovery — either discovering a brand new natural object or discovering possibly that we’re not alone,” D’Antonio said.
Science Says Wormhole Travel is Real; Can We Use it for Exotic Propulsion?
Once believed to be sci-fi fantasy, new research suggests we may be able to achieve interstellar travel using wormholes as shortcuts through spacetime.
Recently, physicist Pascal Koiran at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France published a pre-print study detailing the potential that matter could enter the event horizon of a black hole and pass through a wormhole and exit out the other end intact. Though still highly theoretical, wormholes are believed to be incredibly unstable as they exist as a tunnel between a black hole and a white hole in another part of the universe.
But because nothing, including light, can escape a black hole once it has crossed its event horizon, physicists have believed that matter would need to somehow enter the wormhole outside of the event horizon in order to safely pass through.
Dr. Simeon Hein, director of the Institute for Resonance, explains the mind-bending physics of this theoretical phenomenon.
“So the idea people were beginning to think, ‘well, what happens to the matter and energy that gets condensed and condensed into a black hole?’” Dr. Hein said. “The idea was that it had to be ejected somewhere else beyond that point in space. And that became the idea of a wormhole to another point in spacetime where all the matter and energy would be ejected from the black hole to conserve this idea of symmetry which is the foundation of modern physics — that there’s kind of a basic symmetry to the universe. And so the other side of the wormhole is a white hole.”
If wormholes have been conceptualized by theoretical physics for decades, what is so novel about the mathematics proposed in this recent paper?
“Physicist Pascal Koiran in France, he looked at another way to measure what’s going on in the mathematics of black holes. He used a different metric than Einstein would have used because back in the 1950s, two different physicists, David Finkelstein and Sir Arthur Eddington of the Royal Society in the UK, both proposed that there was this point of no return in the black hole where once you got past a certain point, it was no longer symmetrical, you couldn’t leave anymore, the so-called Schwarzschild radius,” Dr. Hein said.
“Past this point, you would just keep getting more compressed and you would have to go through the wormhole. So, using the so-called Finkelstein-Eddington metric — and a metric, by the way, is kind of the idea of a standard unit of measurement, a standard unit of anything: speed, direction, or position — using this measurement Koiran was able to show that it’s actually more stable than you think; that there is some stability even at the highest level of gravitational compression in a black hole. This would suggest that moving through it, maybe something really would survive.”
