MYSTERIOUS signals are being detected coming from a star that has been radio silent for more than a decade, according to scientists.
Radio signals are very powerful and their sudden appearance has confused experts.
According to Living Science, The strange star is a magnetar that suddenly became very active again in 2018.
Magnetars are a type of dead star with extremely powerful magnetic fields.
They are technically the most powerful magnetic objects in the universe.
A magnetar’s magnetic field is about a trillion times stronger than Earth’s.
Only 30 have been detected so far and this unusually active one could change what was previously understood about stars.
This month, two new studies were published about the star in the journal Nature Astronomy.
The magnetar that is confusing scientists is called XTE J1810-197.
“We report here new high-cadence radio observations of the magnetar XTE J1810-197 recorded shortly after an X-ray burst,” one of the studies said. explains.
Both studies found a strange flickering effect occurring in the signals.
Neither study reveals what was causing the unusual behavior.
Patrick Weltevrede, an astrophysicist at the University of Manchester, worked on both studies.
“Our findings demonstrate that exotic physical processes are involved in producing radio waves that we can detect with sensitive radio telescopes.
“Additionally, we learned that magnetars are ultra-strong magnets in space that rotate in complicated ways,” he said.
“It was crucial to continue observing the magnetar with radio telescopes even when it was turned off, so that we could capture it soon after the radio burst.
“This is the first time we have sampled data densely enough at the right time to be able to resolve this precession and its damping, made possible through many years of dedicated monitoring of this source with large radio telescopes, including the Lovell Telescope on Jodrell Bank “, said researcher Dr. Lina Levin Preston, also from the University of Manchester.
Facts about the Milky Way
Here are some things you might not know about our galaxy…
- The Milky Way is almost as old as the Universe itself, with recent estimates suggesting that the Universe is around 13.7 or 13.8 billion years old and that the Milky Way is around 13.6 billion years old.
- The Milky Way is disk-shaped and measures about 120,000 light-years in diameter
- It has a supermassive black hole in the middle called Sagittarius A*
- The Milky Way contains more than 200 billion stars
- It is believed to have an invisible halo made of dark matter
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