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 around 16,000 light years away – and a radio signal from there reaches us every 54 minutes. The discovery was published in the journal Nature, but unfortunately there is a problem: it contradicts the physics we know.
Shouldn’t the signal exist and what does it actually say? The term radio signal describes the frequency range and in themselves such signals are nothing special. We know them from white dwarfs or neutron stars. What puzzles researchers around the world, however, is its slow speed. We are usually familiar with repetition rates of hundreds of times per second, not even per hour.
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Physics put to the test
What do schools and universities teach about star corpses? According to our common understanding, stellar corpses of all kinds behave in accordance with the principle of conservation of angular momentum. Before they collapse, they rotate relatively slowly like a figure skater with outstretched arms in a pirouette. But as soon as they collapse under their own gravity, they accelerate extremely – just like the athlete on the ice when she pulls her arms and legs towards her body.
What is a neutron star? This is a once very heavy star that collapsed. If it had been more massive, it would have become a black hole.
What is a white dwarf? Our sun will collapse into such a dwarf in a few billion years. It is therefore a very common stellar corpse in the cosmos.
But what else could it be? Theoretically, a white dwarf could also be considered, but based on the data sets currently available, it doesn’t look like that. Another possibility is a so-called magnetar, which is the idea that astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smethurst puts forward towards the end of her YouTube video.
A magnetar, a special form of neutron star, is characterized by an immensely strong magnetic field. Effects in this field could possibly produce a signal that we can receive every 54 minutes. But this is also not calculable according to our understanding of physics.
For nerds: How would the 54-minute signal be explained in the case of a magnetar? We are talking about squaring the (star) circle: a variable star that at the same time rotates very regularly.
The idea is that the stellar corpse sends signals in our direction more often than almost every hour, but these are not visible to us. It constantly changes its energetic appearance, but rotates extremely uniformly and reaches the same state again exactly every 54 minutes – just when it is aiming at the solar system.
Far less mysterious, but a milestone in German space travel, it is currently making its first attempt in Great Britain to reach orbit. The RFA One, owned by a company in Augsburg, is one of the most important developments in the industry and we will tell you everything you need to know about it in order to be up to date in this article. Incidentally, it flies with car parts, which is typically German.