Mysterious Signal Coming From a Dead Star and Its Companion

When these stars dance, they make their own music. Astronomers have tracked down the source of a mysterious radio signal from deep space repeating every two hours. Intriguingly, it's a pair of stars in such a tight orbit that their magnetic fields regularly bump into each other — and it's this bodily percussion that appears to be blasting out the radio emissions we're picking up on Earth, roughly 1,600 light years away. The findings on the binary system, published in a new study in the journal Nature Astronomy, shine a much-needed light on a new class of cosmic signal known as long-period radio transients. These extremely rare repeating radio pulses are similar to what's emitted by rapidly rotating stars called pulsars, whose signals we see every time their poles turn towards Earth, but repeat every few minutes — or even hours — compared to the latter's sub-second intervals. Simply put, it would be impossible for pulsars to rotate slowly enough to produce long period transients, an ... Read full article.