Something has been glowing in space about every 22 minutes since 1988
On July 19, 2023, researchers at the International Radio Astronomy Research Center submitted a paper on a new celestial body. Among them, knowledge about a mysterious celestial body that periodically emits strange radio waves is shared.
A long-period radio transient active for three decades | Nature
Something in space has been lighting up every 20 minutes since 1988 | Ars Technica
A new celestial body called `` GPM J1839-10 '' observed by researchers moves like a `` pulsar '' that emits pulse-like radio waves and X-rays, and periodically emits burst energy of radio waves.
Pulsars emit radio energy at their magnetic poles, and the rotation of the star causes the magnetic poles to swing across the Earth, creating the appearance of radio flashes each time one of the poles aligns with the Earth.
However, GPM J1839-10 seems to behave a little differently than a pulsar. Normally, the interval between flashes of pulsars is very short, from 1 minute to milliseconds.
Since the magnetic field that generates radio waves is generated by the rotation of stars, if the rotation is too slow, it will not be possible to generate radio waves large enough to be seen from the earth. Therefore, it seems that it is usually not possible to confirm that the pulse interval takes more than 1 minute.
Observations show that the radio burst of GPM J1839-10 has a blank period of about 400 seconds in the period of about 1320 seconds, and a radio burst of 30 to 300 seconds occurs at any time during this period. During activity, the intensity of GPM J1839-10 varies, showing multiple weak signals within a strong signal, with occasional gaps without bursts.
When researchers searched archive data, similar phenomena could be traced back to 1988, confirming that the phenomenon causing this burst was not transient. However, it seems that there are few known celestial bodies that can cause such behavior.
There are a number of possibilities, one of which is that GPM J1839-10 is a white dwarf with an unusually strong magnetic field. These objects are so large that they take a long time to rotate, which makes sense for the long intervals between radio bursts. However, only one periodically emitting celestial body has been observed so far, and since it outputs much less energy than GPM J1839-10, it is quite possible that it is something else.
In order to deepen further knowledge in the future, it is necessary to reliably capture the on and off states of the burst, and to search for similar objects.
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in Science, Posted by log1p_kr