Astronomers discover disappearing radio source in the Milky Way’s center

[Peter1469]

The signal could be from a new type of object.

Astronomers discover disappearing radio source in the Milky Way’s center

Something in the chaotic heart of the Milky Way is flashing Earth. It beams radio waves our way for weeks, only to disappear the next day and stay dark for months. Astronomers first spotted the flakey radio emitter in 2020, and after more than a year of intermittent observations have been able to confirm little more than that the object is deeply strange. It resists categorization as one of the usual suspects, leading researchers to wonder if it might represent an entirely new type of astronomical object.


“The signal switches on and off apparently at random,” said Ziteng Wang, the University of Sydney PhD student who identified the radio source, in a press release. “We’ve never seen anything like it.”


Going where the action is

The signal popped up during a pilot survey using the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), organized by Tara Murphy of the University of Sydney and David Kaplan of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Eventually, the astronomers hope to use the newly constructed array of 36 dishes, each standing three stories tall and spanning nearly 40 feet across, to scour a quarter of the Australian sky for radio sources that change monthly. But as ASKAP ramps up, they decided to focus their pilot on the galactic center, where gravity draws all manner of exotic objects to a sort of cosmic watering hole.


“We know there’s a lot of weird stuff that goes on near there: a supermassive black hole, magnetars, pulsars, all sorts of stuff,” Kaplan says. “We wanted to probe that.”


Wang noticed the anomaly while analyzing the survey’s first set of observations. Where ASKAP had seen nothing in October 2019, one point shone brightly in radio waves in January 2020.


In April, the researchers homed in on the spot with the single-dish Parkes Observatory, which specializes in hunting pulsars, the small, spinning stars that pulse with radio waves. But the instrument saw nothing.


They jumped to South Africa’s MeerKAT array, which can spot both persistent and pulsating signals. They checked the spot of sky periodically for months, but it stayed dark. The team had just started to lose hope when suddenly MeerKAT saw the bright point in February of this year. The signal was real.


“Then, we hit it with everything,” Kaplan says.

[Just AnotherPerson]

Very cool story. There is so much much that we don't know. It's an adventure for sure.

[FindersKeepers]

That is soooooo cool!

Thanks for posting that one!

[Peter1469]

And no, its not aliens. Further in the article it notes that the radio source is many wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. Like a natural source. A communication device (made; not natural) would almost certainly pick one.

Although if you want a type of encryption you can frequency hop with a device that syncs the radios you want to be able to communicate. But that's not what the OP is talking about.