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Scientists haven’t been able to figure out what has been causing radio signals to be sent to Earth from space at 22 minute intervals for more than 35 years.
The signals have been going on since at least 1988, but only recently did scientists notice them.
Researchers also now believe they may have pinpointed the origin of where they are coming from. Their discoveries were recently paper published in the journal Nature.
There’s just one problem. They haven’t been able to figure out what the strange spinning object that’s been sending the signals actually is, though they think it might be a very slow moving magnetar.
According to Newsweek, the object, named GPM J1839-10, is located approximately 15,000 light years away from Earth.
Normally in situations like this, the object will send out radio wave pulses around once per second.
“This is absurdly slow,” Natasha Hurley-Walker, an astrophysicist at Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Australia, and co-author of the paper, told Newsweek. “Magnetars are highly magnetic, young neutron stars, usually rotating once every one or two seconds, and they produce bright X-ray emission. A handful (six out of the 30 known) occasionally produce radio emission for a few weeks to months at a time.”
Another magnetar named GLEAM-X J162759.5−523504.3 previously sent out similar signals every 18 minutes, but went silent after just three months in 2018.
“For GLEAM-XJ1627, we thought that this temporary radio emission might be a good fit to what we saw. But GPMJ1839-10 really challenges that interpretation,” Hurley-Walker said. “We’ve observed it producing bright radio pulses while we simultaneously observed with XMM-Newton, a powerful X-ray space telescope. We saw no X-rays; if it were a magnetar, we would expect to see them. And magnetars aren’t normally active for decades, while GPMJ1839-10 has been producing radio pulses since at least 1988.”
Another possible explanation for GPM J1839-10 is that it is a highly magnetic white dwarf star, “but we would not expect them to be so bright,” said Hurley-Walker.
This is far from the first time mysterious radio signals have been detected in space.
In May, U.S. Department of Energy scientists say they discovered low-frequency infrasound signals that are coming from a source that “is completely unknown.”
And in April, a “coherent” radio signal was detected coming from a distant exoplanet, suggesting that there could be exoplanets out there that are habitable for alien life.
Of course, there is one other possible explanation for these mysterious signals: aliens
Scientists recently states that alien contact with Earth could come as soon as the year 2029, and that they may may use a recent supernova to communicate with us.