Galactic centre radio transients are also called “cosmic burpers”. Cosmic burper? And if so, what’s a cosmic burper? “It could be that we’ve discovered one of these, so in a way that’s exciting, because there are very few of them known, but also frustrating because we don’t actually know what actually are,” Professor Murphy said. It was an exciting proposition, but it came with a catch - nobody knows what galactic centre radio transients are. Scientists have observed very few of these radio signals and have noted that they all behave somewhat differently. It could belong to a category of rare objects called galactic centre radio transients. That left one possibility, anywhere within the realm of current knowledge. But it was completely invisible, so they ruled that out. The signal was so strong that the source should be visible. The next possibility was that the object was a massive solar flare. Inset shows the radio signal switched off, then on, as demonstrated by the MeerKAT telescope. However, the team found that it didn’t display the properties of a pulsar or even a magnetar (another variety of dead, spinning stars). So the team relocated to South Africa to search for the object with the MeerKAT Telescope, which can detect pulses and capture images of the radio signals.Īfter three months of searching, the signal appeared. Pulsars commonly send out regular bursts of high energy, so the team trained the Parkes Radio Telescope (famous for detecting pulsars) at it.īut they didn’t find anything. The first possibility was that it was a pulsar, the rapidly spinning heart of a dead star. They started with three options on the table. In the months following the initial discovery, Wang led the far-flung group of scientists from Australia’s national science agency CSIRO, Germany, the United States, Canada, South Africa, Spain, and France in the attempt to identify the signal’s source. With all questions and no answers, the team got to work. Murphy went on to say that the radio signal’s behavior “rules out almost all astronomical objects we know of.” So…what is it? “Sometimes it seems to stay on, detectable for days or weeks at a time, and then other times it can come on and off in a single day, which is extremely fast for an astronomical object,” Tara Murphy, University of Sydney Professor and study co-author said. It showed up regularly for the next couple of weeks, then disappeared without a trace.Ī few months later, it suddenly came back. The team first detected the radio signal with the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope in the Australian outback. “We’ve never seen anything like it.” First Contact “The brightness of the object also varies dramatically, by a factor of 100, and the signal switches on and off, apparently at random,” Wang added. “This means its light oscillates in only one direction, but that direction rotates with time. “The strangest property of this new signal is that it has a very high polarization,” lead study author Ziteng Wang of the University of Sydney said in a press release. After using a broad array of techniques to detect and interpret them, scientists on the project still don’t know what their source is. In a study released today, The Astrophysical Journal says that the signals first appeared in January 2020.

The radio signals, which appear to issue from the centre of our galaxy, arrive sporadically and travel in a pattern that defies current understanding. Strange signals coming from an unidentified outer space object are baffling scientists internationally.

Strange radio signal from space