Every 54 minutes a stellar call from 16,000 light years away: A mysterious signal challenges our understanding of physics.
What is so special about the object? The “Something” behind the cryptic name ASKAP J1935+2148
is about 16,000 light years away – and every 54 minutes a radio signal reaches us from there. The discovery was published in the journal Nature, unfortunately, there is a problem: It contradicts the physics known to us.
If the signal shouldn’t exist, what does it even mean? The term radio signal describes the frequency range, and such signals are not unusual by themselves. We are familiar with them from white dwarfs or neutron stars. However, what puzzles researchers worldwide is its sluggish pace. Because we usually know repetition rates of hundreds of times per second, not just once per hour.
Physics put to the test
What do schools and universities teach about stellar remnants? According to our usual understanding, stellar remnants of all kinds behave according to the principle of conservation of angular momentum. Before they collapse, they rotate like a figure skater with outstretched arms in a relatively slow pirouette. However, once they collapse under their own gravity, they accelerate extremely – just like the athlete on the ice when she pulls her arms and legs toward her body.
What is a white dwarf? Our sun will collapse into such a dwarf in several billion years. It is a very common type of stellar remnant in the cosmos.
But what else could it be? Theoretically, a white dwarf could also be considered, but according to the currently available data that doesn’t seem to be the case. A so-called magnetar is also possible, as the astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smethurst suggests towards the end of her YouTube video.
A magnetar, as a special form of a neutron star, is characterized by an immensely strong magnetic field. Effects in this could possibly generate a signal that we receive every 54 minutes. But even that is not calculable according to our understanding of physics.
The idea is that the stellar remnant sends signals in our direction more often than quasi-hourly, but they are not recognizable to us. It constantly changes its energetic appearance but rotates extremely uniformly and reaches precisely the same state every 54 minutes – just when it is aiming at the solar system.
Much less mysterious, but a milestone in German space travel, is currently taking off in Great Britain to reach orbit for the first time. The RFA One from a company in Augsburg is one of the significant developments in the industry, and we will tell you everything you should know about it, to stay up to date, in this article. By the way, it is powered by car parts, somehow typically German.
