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Odd, slowly repeating radio bursts traced to red dwarf star
- Astronomers have pinpointed the source of slowly repeating radio bursts in space for the first time: a red dwarf star with a possible white dwarf companion.
- In 2022, astronomers discovered a signal of powerful radio bursts from space that repeated every 18 minutes. They have been trying to determine their origin ever since.
- All of them are immensely far away, in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, making it difficult to figure out what kind of star or object produces the radio waves.
- A team of astronomers led by researchers at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, said the source of a newly discovered slow repeater is a red dwarf star about 5,000 light-years away.
- According to current knowledge, pulsars that rotate as slow as that should not produce any radio waves, so it seemed less likely that a pulsar was the explanation.
- On the outskirts of their galaxy, astronomers have discovered another slow repeater radio source named GLEAM-X J0704-37, and it’s the slowest one yet with pulses repeating every 2.9 hours.
- The radio signals didn’t seem to be coming from the star itself, however, and it was most likely a white dwarf star, the researchers added.
- Red dwarf likely emits a stream of charged particles, like our sun’s solar wind. When those particles collide with the white dwarf’s magnetic field, that would create radio waves.
- Astronomers first detected similar repeating radio signals back in 2022, from a source dubbed GLEAM-X J162759.5-523504. They were intense in strength, but after three months, they vanished. What was causing them?
- The researchers wrote about the new findings in The Conversation on December 1, 2024, and published peer-reviewed results in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on November 26.
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