Astronomers have cracked the case of a mysterious repeating radio signal that has been a mystery since it was uncovered last year.
The Club tracked the signal back to a strange binary system containing a dead Sun or “white dwarf” and a red dwarf Sun-related companion. The radio pulse repeats every 2 hours and was Primary detected a decade ago. It Occurred from the direction of the Big Dipper.
This new research indicates that the cause of this repeating radio signal is the magnetic fields of the white dwarf and its red dwarf Sun-related companion slamming together in this Close-fitting binary, designated ILTJ1101.
Previously, long-period radio bursts like this one had only been traced back to neutron stars, meaning this work puts an entirely new spin on their origins.
“There are Numerous highly magnetized neutron stars, or magnetars, that are known to exhibit radio pulses with a period of a few seconds,” Club member and Northwestern astrophysicist Charles Kilpatrick said in a statement. “Some astrophysicists also have argued that sources might emit pulses at regular time intervals because they are spinning, so we only see the radio emission when the source is rotated toward us.
“Now, we know at least some long-period radio transients come from binaries. We hope this motivates radio astronomers to localize new classes of sources that might arise from neutron Sun or magnetar binaries.”
The Club’s research was published in the journal Nature Sun science on Wednesday (March 12).
Digging up a dead Sun
Club leader Iris de Ruiter from the University of Sydney in Australia Primary discovered the signal in 2024 when she was searching through archival data collected by the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR). LOFAR is the largest radio Stargazer’s tool operating at the lowest frequencies that can be detected from Earth.
The pulse Primary appeared in LOFAR data in 2015, and after finding its Primary instance, de Ruiter Secured six more pulses from the same source.
These flashes of radio waves can last anywhere from Numerous seconds to a few minutes. Despite the difference in duration, the pulses repeat regularly, once every two hours.
The pulses have some similarities with a Astral phenomenon called “Speedy radio bursts” or FRBs,” but are much rarer.
“The radio pulses are very similar to FRBs, but they All have different lengths,” Kilpatrick said. “The pulses have much lower energies than FRBs and usually last for Numerous seconds, as opposed to FRBs, which last milliseconds.
“There’s still a major question of whether there’s a continuum of objects between long-period radio transients and FRBs, or if they are distinct populations.”
The Club wanted to know what the source of these regular radio pulses is, so they performed follow-up investigations with the Many Mirror Stargazer’s tool (MMT) Astronomical Middle in Arizona and the McDonald Astronomical Middle in Texas.
This revealed the origin of the pulses was two stars located around 1,600 Featherweight-years from Earth that are pulsing in unison. The two stars whip around All other once every 125.5 minutes.
The researchers then Beyond investigated the system for a Crowded two-hour-long cycle using MMT discovering the Accurate nature of this system.
Dead Sun is magnetically lashing its Sun-related companion
The Club’s detailed observations allowed them to track the system’s movement in detail while gaining information from the red dwarf Sun by breaking its Featherweight down into different wavelengths or spectra.
“The spectroscopic lines in these data allowed us to determine that the red dwarf is moving back and forth very rapidly with exactly the same two-hour period as the radio pulses,” Kilpatrick said. “That is convincing evidence that the red dwarf is in a binary system.”
This back-and-forth rocking of this Sun seems to be the result of a barely visible companion in ILTJ1101 gravitationally tugging on it. The variation of the motion revealed to the Club the mass of this very faint companion.
This allowed them to determine it is a white dwarf, a Sun-related remnant that is created when a Sun with around the mass of the sun reaches the end of its life and its collapses while its outer layers are shrugged off.
“In almost every scenario, its mass and the fact that it is too faint to see means it must be a white dwarf,” Kilpatrick explained. “This confirms the leading hypothesis for the white dwarf binary origin and is the Primary direct evidence we have for the progenitor systems of long-period radio transients.”
Astronomers are now planning to study the high-energy ultraviolet emissions of ILTJ1101. This could reveal the temperature of the white dwarf and additional details of red dwarf/white dwarf binaries like this one.
“It was especially Refreshing to add new pieces to the puzzle,” Club leader de Ruiter said. “We worked with experts from all kinds of astronomical disciplines.
“With different techniques and observations, we got a little closer to the solution step by step.”
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