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In archival observations from 2013 onward, the same source kept reappearing briefly before fading back into the background.<\/p>\n
At the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR<\/a>) Natasha Hurley-Walker tied the pulses to a single visible star system.<\/p>\n That difference matters because earlier examples sat in packed star<\/a> fields where overlapping light hid the exact object producing each burst.<\/p>\n With a cleaner target now in hand, the argument moves from guessing about the source to testing how two stars could make it.<\/p>\n A class emerges<\/p>\n Astronomers place the source<\/a> in the class of long-period radio transients, objects that send repeating radio flashes minutes or hours apart.<\/p>\n Most known examples were first spotted toward crowded inner regions of the galaxy, which kept their actual homes unclear.<\/p>\n This one breaks that pattern, because its position near the galaxy\u2019s edge leaves fewer stars competing for the same patch of sky.<\/p>\n That does not solve the mystery outright, but it gives astronomers a far clearer place to test competing ideas.<\/p>\n A third-year undergraduate made the crucial difference by building search code to comb old data from the Murchison Widefield Array. <\/p>\n The powerful radio telescope in Western Australia scans the sky for low-frequency cosmic signals.<\/p>\n That system sifted thousands of observations and separated real flashes from the far larger pile of false alarms and image artifacts.<\/p>\n Once the hidden pulse<\/a> appeared, the team could track earlier bursts across more than a decade of stored data.<\/p>\n Such history matters because a source active for years suggests archives may hold many more signals nobody has recognized yet.<\/p>\n Finding the red dwarf<\/p>\n Follow-up work with telescopes in South Africa and Chile pinned the source to a dim red dwarf about 5,000 light-years away.<\/p>\n That star turned out to be an M dwarf<\/a>, a small cool star type that makes up 70% of Milky Way stars.<\/p>\n \u201cAn M dwarf alone couldn\u2019t generate the amount of energy we\u2019re seeing,\u201d said Hurley-Walker. <\/p>\n So the case moved toward an unseen companion and prepared the ground for a white dwarf explanation.<\/p>\n A binary system<\/p>\n The best fit is a white dwarf, the dense core left after a star dies, orbiting the red dwarf in the same system.<\/p>\n Strong magnetic fields could accelerate particles between the pair, producing brief radio flashes when the geometry lines up with Earth.<\/p>\n \u201cTogether, they power radio emission,\u201d Hurley-Walker said, describing the combined effect of the two stars.<\/p>\n For now, the team still needs sharper ultraviolet evidence, so the companion remains a strong case rather than a final verdict.<\/p>\n Rejecting the neutron star<\/p>\n A highly magnetic neutron star remains possible only briefly before the evidence pushes against it.<\/p>\n Because the system sits well above the galaxy\u2019s crowded middle, a young magnetar, a neutron star with extreme magnetism, looks unlikely here.<\/p>\n The radio brightness also seems too high for an old neutron star slowly losing rotation to power the bursts.<\/p>\n That leaves the white dwarf<\/a> idea looking less unusual than the alternative, even if both remain imperfect fits.<\/p>\n Inside each radio burst<\/p>\n Each burst lasts only 30 to 60 seconds, yet inside that brief window the signal breaks into finer structure.<\/p>\n MeerKAT data showed rapid changes within the pulse, a clue that strong ordered magnetic fields were shaping the emission.<\/p>\n The timing may also wobble across roughly six years, although the paper treats that longer cycle as tentative.<\/p>\n Those details matter because they point away from a simple flare and toward a process governed by repeating internal physics.<\/p>\n The archive advantage<\/p>\n The telescope<\/a> that caught the signal has been operating since 2013, and its archive offers about 50 petabytes of storage.<\/p>\n That scale lets astronomers compare years of observations, checking whether a strange source flickered once, for months, or for years.<\/p>\n In this case, old files turned a one-off oddity into a long-running pattern with enough history to study seriously.<\/p>\n For radio astronomy, the payoff may come first not from a new telescope but from better searches of old data.<\/p>\n A growing pattern<\/p>\n Another recent system<\/a> showed a red dwarf and white dwarf producing periodic radio pulses on a two-hour cycle.<\/p>\n That parallel strengthens the idea that at least some of these bursts come from interacting binaries rather than lone stellar remnants.<\/p>\n The source still may not behave exactly like that earlier case, especially because its pulse period stretches even longer.<\/p>\n Even so, the match hints that astronomers are no longer chasing one cosmic oddball, but a family of related systems.<\/p>\n What the signal changes<\/p>\n A signal found in forgotten files now links precise radio flashes, a visible red dwarf, and a white dwarf companion into one story.<\/p>\n Sharper ultraviolet observations and continued timing will decide whether this record-setting source becomes the template for many others hiding in archives.<\/p>\n The study is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read?\u00a0Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a>\u00a0for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on\u00a0EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by\u00a0Eric Ralls<\/a>\u00a0and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A buried radio pulse has become the clearest case yet that one of astronomy\u2019s strangest repeating signals comes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":327384,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-327383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327383\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/327384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}