NASA has spotted something sending cosmic morse signals. The universe is always reaching out to us. Strange pulses, flickers of light — they come from every direction. And yet, we’ve never found life beyond Earth. Some believe that’s because civilizations out there are staying quiet. Most of the time, those signals are just stars doing what stars do — blinking, beating, like distant beacons. But recently, scientists spotted something different. A light, incredibly bright, pointed straight at us. And only the strongest telescope we have was able to catch it.

What is signaling Earth?

It’s not just stars that send “cosmic morse signals” into space — black holes can do it too. When something falls into one, a part of it can be thrown back out at nearly the speed of light. This happens because of a reaction between protons and electrons right before the matter is swallowed. These violent jets aren’t as common as the ones stars produce, but they’re still out there.

Young stars, in particular, are known for throwing out strong bursts of gas and dust. This is part of how they’re born. As material from the disk around the star spirals inward, some of it gets caught by the star’s magnetic field and is shot out in two narrow streams, shooting away from the star’s poles.

NASA spotted cosmic morse signals

From Earth, we can only spot these cosmic jets with the help of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory — a telescope built to see the universe in high-energy light. It’s one of our best tools for looking deep into space. And now, it’s spotted something that could shift how we understand stars and how they form.

Something strange in the sky — called ASKAP J1832 — has caught the eyes of astronomers. It’s about 15,000 light-years away, and it is like cosmic morse signals: it helps us learn more about a class of space objects we still barely understand.

This one belongs to a new group scientists started identifying in 2022, known as “long-period radio transients.” Unlike pulsars, which fire off signals every few seconds or faster, ASKAP J1832 moves much slower. It sends out a radio burst every 44 minutes, with each signal lasting several minutes. That’s thousands of times slower than what we’re used to seeing from spinning neutron stars.

Two telescopes worked simultaneously

Astronomers used two very different tools: NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which zooms in on small areas of the sky, and Australia’s Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, which scans much wider regions. Both happened to be looking at the same place at the same time — a rare overlap that made this discovery possible. The findings of the cosmic morse signals were published in Nature.

Dr. Ziteng Wang, the lead researcher from Curtin University, said that picking up cosmic morse signals coming from ASKAP J1832-0911 felt like a stroke of luck — the timing lined up just right.

Scientists don’t know what’s causing the signal – or why the interval is precise

Scientists still don’t know exactly what’s causing these morse signals, or why they switch on and off at such odd and steady intervals — always aimed in our direction. According to Dr. Wang, ASKAP J1832-0911 doesn’t act like anything they’ve seen before.

One idea is that it could be a magnetar. Another theory points to a binary system, with a white dwarf that has an unusually strong magnetic field. Whatever it is, the way it behaves is strange enough to make scientists question what they thought they knew about deep space.

A white dwarf is a small, dense star in its final stage of life. What remains is just the core — all that’s left after a star like our Sun burns through its fuel and sheds its outer layers.