A team of astronomers led by Iris de Ruiter of the University of Sydney has discovered the source of a mysterious radio signal that was sending out pulses every two hours. The signal, detected over several years, was initially thought to resemble fast radio bursts, but further investigation revealed it to be something new.
The mystery signal is believed to come from a binary star system, approximately 1,645 light-years away from Earth. The system consists of a white dwarf and a red dwarf star that are gravitationally entangled in an extremely close orbit. As the two stars move around each other, their magnetic fields crash together, producing bursts of radio waves.
“We know that some binary systems can produce radio pulses,” says de Ruiter. “But what’s unique about this system is that it’s so close together that we see a burst of energy every 125.5 minutes.”
The discovery has significant implications for the field of astrophysics, as it suggests that some sources of mystery radio waves in the universe may be the result of binary interactions. The team plans to study ILT J1101+5521 in more detail to learn about the properties of the red dwarf star and the white dwarf with which it shares its unusual orbit.
This is the first time that radio pulses have been traced back to a binary object, and it could help explain some of the repeating fast radio burst sources scattered across the universe. The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.
Source: https://www.sciencealert.com/source-of-mystery-radio-signal-traced-to-clash-of-magnetic-titans