![]() ![]() ![]() United States space agency Nasa is even planning to put a radio telescope on the far side of the moon, where it will be shielded from Earth’s cacophony.Ī microwave oven was famously responsible for a mystery that plagued CSIRO scientists for 17 years. Radio frequency interference (Rfi) is such a common problem for astronomers that they are constantly looking for quieter places to study the sky – such as the Square Kilometre Array, which is being built in Western Australia’s vast outback. So somewhere in the area around Parkes, some malfunctioning device made it look as though someone – or something – was out there. Price said to think about “turning it up to eleven”, as in the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. “It’s more than one signal and they have mixed together in a complicated way.” We don’t think it’s being done on purpose, it’s just an amplifier not acting properly. “You take the frequencies and make new frequencies. ![]() That’s because you’re deliberately tuning the amps and going into overdrive. “In a guitar amp, for example, if you’re listening to rock, to Nirvana or Black Sabbath, the guitar has a distinct distorted tone. “We think it was an intermodulation, which happens in an amplifier when you have more than one frequency running through it,” Price, who also works for the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, said. ![]() © 2023 NYP Holdings, Inc.In two articles, written by an international team and published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Tuesday, researchers reported while the signals were “broadly consistent” with a technosignature, they were most likely an “intermodulation”.Ĭo-author on both papers Dr Danny Price said they still don’t know exactly what caused the ET-like pattern, but used the analogy of a guitar amplifier to explain what happened. This article originally appeared on The Sun and was reproduced here with permission. “Compact binaries are efficiently formed inside globular clusters, so a model invoking them could also be responsible for the observed bursts,” the study’s authors added.Īlthough there is not enough evidence to definitively determine the cause of the FRB, a flashing black hole may also be responsible, according to past studies (per ).įRB20200120E was initially detected in 2021 using the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) 70 m dish (DSS-63) at radio frequencies between 2.2 and 2.3 GHz, according to Harvard’s Astrophysics Data System. “We propose instead that FRB 20200120E originates from a highly magnetized neutron star formed either through the accretion-induced collapse of a white dwarf or the merger of compact stars in a binary system,” the study noted. This is strange because globular clusters are home to a community of very old (and typically low-mass) stars – contradictory to our current belief that FRBs are formed in high-mass, core-collapsing supernovas.Īlbeit rare, researchers propose that it is not completely out of the realm of possibilities that the FRB is coming from the globular cluster, citing several potential scenarios. “Here we report observations that localized the FRB to a globular cluster associated with M81, where it is 2 parsecs away from the optical center of the cluster,” the researchers wrote in a journal article. Still, there is one element in the recent findings that are baffling scientists: The signal seems to be associated with a globular cluster. If the radio signal did indeed come from M81 it would make FRB20200120E the closest known extragalactic fast radio burst – 40 times closer to our galaxy than the next-closest extragalactic FRB, according to Science Alert. However, now astronomers think that FRB20200120E may be coming from the direction of nearby galaxy M81, which is about 11.74 million light-years away. The recently discovered space signal is categorized as a repeating fast radio burst (FRB) and has been designated ‘FRB 20200120E,’ according to a new study published in the journal Nature.įRBs are defined as a very intense, millisecond-long burst of radio waves that are produced by unidentified sources in deep space. Strange ‘cylinder’ spotted in Mars rover image baffles NASA fansĪmericans up in arms by today's Wordle because it’s ‘too British’Īstronomers have identified a nearby galaxy as the point of origin of a mystifying space signal. Mysterious new substance discovered deep in Earth’s core China says it's not responsible for mystery rogue rocket ![]()
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