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Something In Space Has Been Lighting Up Every 20 Minutes Since 1988 (arstechnica.com) 86

Researchers have announced the discovery of an astronomical object called GPM J1839-10, which emits regular bursts of radio energy similar to a pulsar but with a much longer interval between pulses of 21 minutes. The nature and physics behind this behavior remain unknown, as it does not fit into any existing astronomical categories or explanations, making it a unique and enigmatic phenomenon that requires further study and observation. Ars Technica reports: GPM J1839-10 was discovered in a search of the galactic plane for transient objects -- something that's not there when you first look, but appears the next time you check. The typical explanation for a transient object is something like a supernova, where a major event gives something an immense boost in brightness. They're found at the radio end of the spectrum, fast radio bursts, but are also very brief and, so, fairly difficult to spot. In any case, GPM J1839-10 showed up in the search in a rather unusual way: It showed up as a transient item twice in the same night of observation. Rather than delivering a short burst of immense energy, such as a fast radio burst, GPM J1839-10 was much lower energy and spread out over a 30-second-long burst.

Follow-on observations showed that the object repeated pretty regularly, with a periodicity of about 1,320 seconds (more commonly known as 22 minutes). There's a window of about 400 seconds centered on that periodicity, and a burst can appear anywhere within the window and will last anywhere from 30 to 300 seconds. While active, the intensity of GPM J1839-10 can vary, with lots of sub-bursts within the main signal. Occasionally, a window will also go by without any bursts. A search through archival data showed that signals had been detected at the site as far back as 1988. So, whatever is producing this signal is not really a transient, in the sense that the phenomenon that's producing these bursts isn't a one-time-only event. The list of known objects that can produce this sort of behavior is short and consists of precisely zero items. [...]

So, given that every possible explanation is terrible, where do we go from here? The good news is that these objects will be so difficult to spot that it's possible there are a lot more out there that we've overlooked. The bad news is that they're still hard to spot. The length of the burst -- up to 300 seconds -- and the gap between bursts mean short-cadence observations will likely either see something there the whole time or miss it entirely. We'd really need to have hardware stare at a single area of space for a half-hour or more, and to have its staring divided up into multiple exposures, to be sure we catch it in both its on and off states. And that involves a major commitment of hardware. In the meantime, we can potentially narrow down the location of GPM J1839-10 to try to see if there's anything interesting in other wavelengths. Since this is located within the galactic plane, however, that's going to be challenging as well.

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Something In Space Has Been Lighting Up Every 20 Minutes Since 1988

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  • by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Thursday July 20, 2023 @02:34AM (#63700948) Homepage

    Obviously it must be an alien beacon signalling to us!

    • by YetAnotherDrew ( 664604 ) on Thursday July 20, 2023 @02:40AM (#63700954)
      UFO car alarm?
      • by ls671 ( 1122017 ) on Thursday July 20, 2023 @03:32AM (#63701040) Homepage

        Nah, it's an alien lighthouse...

        • It's the galactic version of Old Faithful. Not predictable enough to set your watch by, but reliable enough to be labeled "periodic".

          Given that the source is 18,500 light-years away, it must be happening to something the size of a star. Most likely two stellar objects orbiting each other with one slowly siphoning off energy from the other and emitting radio burst in a periodic fashion.

          We've only noticed the phenomenon for the past 35 years (a blink of an eye in the life of a star) so this pulsing might go

    • by Gabest ( 852807 )

      Hey, I have my DVD collection in Avi 480p!

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Joce640k ( 829181 )

      Obviously it must be an alien beacon signalling to us!

      How egocentric is that?

      It's an alien navigation beacon, sure, but it wasn't built for us .

      • by Immerman ( 2627577 ) on Thursday July 20, 2023 @07:30AM (#63701362)

        A navigation beacon seems unlikely with that kind of power. You're in space - it's already full of much more powerful stars to navigate by, and there's not really anything around to block the view. And if it's for in-system navigation there wouldn't be any reason to make it powerful enough to be detected at interstellar distances.

        And since tight-beam communication works much better for actually *communicating*, the only obvious reason to build a high power beacon in space is to attract the attention of people who don't already know you're there. Which means it likely IS intended for us - not personally, but as members of the group of people who don't know they're there.

        • by mysidia ( 191772 )

          it's already full of much more powerful stars to navigate by

          Those might not be sufficient - consider the problem that you can't just look at a star and figure out how far you are away from that star. You can navigate at a large scale, but you are getting something imprecise. Figuring precise positions is more a problem. If you needed a reference for precise relative positions in space, then artificial beacons could be helpful.

          Might be a beacon for establishing a consistent timing synchronization (Ke

          • Which is why I also mentioned in-system navigation.

            Over interstellar distances you've got the parallax of stars perpendicular to your direction of motion with which to determine distance. It's really only in-system that there's much call for greater precision. Which doesn't need to be detectable at interstellar distances.

            For time synchronization and/or a better "galactic positioning (and speed) service" you've already got pulsars all over the place giving those precise pulses from many different locations

        • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

          He was being humourous. Must be aspie day again.

        • Bro, I want to believe too... but seriously, there is likely a mundane (but still interesting) description of what is happening without involving aliens. This is not precise enough to be considered any sort of beacon. The variability implies an orbit of some sort in another system is temporarily "blocking" the view.

          • What's NOT mundane about distant aliens? We're here, so we know intelligent life exists, and all our best (very poor quality) estimates say there's a good chance there's lots of other life in our galaxy, some of it billions of years older than us.

            Aliens *here* needs some contrived assumptions - aliens "out there"... not so much. Enough so that "Where are they?" is a famous paradox.

            Now sure, any particular possible signal has a good chance of actually being some bizarre natural occurrence - the universe is

            • I am not saying you are wrong. I am saying you are too hopeful. There is definitely life somewhere else in this Universe.

              Honestly, I think we were lucky to have evolved so quickly, so I think we may be one of the earlier civilizations... but surely there was evolution that happened even more rapidly elsewhere. But, how far away? Distance = time.

              Just like the recent UFO 'reveal'. I was about to ready to become excited and then *POOF* any authenticity was blown away. No pictures, no materials, no preserved bo

              • To be clear - I do *not* expect this, or any other particular signal to be the real deal - but I think they should all be investigated as such, because it's very likely that some of them are.

                As for us being one of the early ones - that's extremely unlikely unless life itself is extremely rare. I see the sentiment frequently, and it's disconnected from reality.

                Our sun is a relative latecomer among Sol-like third-generation stars in the universe, which started forming about 4 billion years before our sun did,

          • It's important not to let ourselves be blinded by optimism, but being blinded by pessimism can be even worse.

            Especially since pessimism tends to slip in through the cracks under the guise of "being realistic".

            • Pessimism is often mistaken for critical reasoning. The difference is that critical reasoning allows for the impossible, pessimism does not.

              I believe, in the truest sense of the word, that there is some sort of life elsewhere in this Universe. Knowing what I know about the Universe, the chances of any other life forms being advanced enough to find us before we become extinct is roughly zero. The chances of any other life forms to set up a signal that we could see are slightly better as they do not need to

              • Our galaxy is indeed very old - almost as old as the universe, exactly thlike every other galaxy.

                Our sun though is NOT.

                Our sun is only about 4.5 billion years old, roughly the same age as Earth. While third-generation Sol-like stars like ours have been forming for roughly twice that long. We're relative newcomers to the universe, and there's been time enough for plenty of other Earth-like planets to have been developing for twice as long as ours has existed.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Listen, I'm not saying it's aliens. But - it's aliens.

    • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Thursday July 20, 2023 @03:37AM (#63701048)

      Old alien guy, spaceship, turn signal, black hole (time dilation) ...

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      Well, they wanted to send something like Morse code, but it turns out the aliens over there are not very imaginative.

    • Avi's method is misunderstood by most people. He's a real, empirically and rigorously motivated, scientist. Yes we know he wants aliens to be real, but he will admit when he loses an argument, based on the actual evidence. His method is just framing the discussion toward an assumption: "it's aliens" and demanding that everyone prove him wrong. It's not as likely to bear fruit as other scientific strategies because it starts at the same place every time. (He does only do this when there is an evidentiary hol
    • It's signaling to me. I need someone to translate the message.

    • it must be an alien beacon signalling to us!

      Not necessarily. In a billion years, some highly advanced alien civilization will receive the first episode of I Love Lucy, and will turn to a new evolutionary path.

  • angular momentum (Score:4, Informative)

    by spaceman375 ( 780812 ) on Thursday July 20, 2023 @03:04AM (#63700992)
    If two neutron stars spinning in opposit directions merge, the resulting object would spin pretty slowly. Add in drag from lots of mass hanging around, and this could just be the slowest precessing pulsar we've ever seen. Precession is a lot slower than just spin.
    • by ls671 ( 1122017 )

      If two neutron stars spinning in opposit directions merge, the resulting object would spin pretty slowly...

      Weird... I would think this would could happen if they were spinning in the SAME direction...

    • They'd need angular momentum vectors of similar magnitude but opposite direction (sense) for this to happen, but yes. Except ...

      Most neutron stars are around 1 solar mass, so the merged NS would be about 2 solar masses ... which is higher than the mass of any observed NS (I think the maximum is about 1.7 solar masses) by a considerable margin. There are some uncertainties about the absolute maximum, but every astrophysicist I've seen who addresses the question thinks there is a maximum NS mass, above which

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Headline:

    Something In Space Has Been Lighting Up Every 20 Minutes Since 1988

    Summary:

    Researchers have announced the discovery of an astronomical object called GPM J1839-10, which emits regular bursts of radio energy similar to a pulsar but with a much longer interval between pulses of 21 minutes.

    Body:

    Follow-on observations showed that the object repeated pretty regularly, with a periodicity of about 1,320 seconds (more commonly known as 22 minutes).

    So, 20, 21, or 22 minutes? Make up your mind, please.

    • by ls671 ( 1122017 )

      lol! I noticed the obvious discrepancy between title and summary but restrained from posting not to sound picky. Now that you add this, I guess you made the point! Congrats!

      • "with a periodicity of about 1,320 seconds (more commonly known as 22 minutes)"

        This part killed me, lol.

        • "with a periodicity of about 1,320 seconds (more commonly known as 22 minutes)"

          This part killed me, lol.

          Yeah, I don't get why they didn't simply write: "about 1,320 seconds (or 22 minutes)".

          1,320 seconds isn't "more commonly known as 22 minutes" because 1,320 seconds isn't commonly known as anything.

          Absolutely nobody is going around saying "I really didn't like the new Marvel movie. The basic idea was good but it was about two 1,320 seconds too long. And they could easily have cut the climax's 1,320 second fight scene down to no more than 780 seconds!"

          • by mysidia ( 191772 )

            nobody is going around saying "I really didn't like the new Marvel movie. The basic idea was good but it was about two 1,320 seconds too long

            This is why you say More commonly known as 22 minutes, which is a sensible thing to say. 22 Minutes IS another name for 1320 seconds, AND 1320 seconds is another name for 22 Minutes. But amongst the general public 22 Minutes IS the more common name for that amount of time.

            • nobody is going around saying "I really didn't like the new Marvel movie. The basic idea was good but it was about two 1,320 seconds too long

              This is why you say More commonly known as 22 minutes, which is a sensible thing to say. 22 Minutes IS another name for 1320 seconds, AND 1320 seconds is another name for 22 Minutes. But amongst the general public 22 Minutes IS the more common name for that amount of time.

              "22 minutes" is a way to describe an amount of time.
              "1,320 seconds" another way to describe that amount of time.
              "0.03666 hours" is another way to describe that amount of time.

              It is not a "name" for anything. Descriptions aren't automatically names. I can't speak for other languages, but that isn't how cardinality/quantity attributes work in English. The number's cardinality/quantity attribute is more of an adjective that modifies the noun. The unit noun itself is the "name" - seconds, minutes, hours, days,

              • by mysidia ( 191772 )

                "22 minutes" is a way to describe an amount of time.
                "1,320 seconds" another way to describe that amount of time.
                "0.03666 hours" is another way to describe that amount of time.
                It is not a "name" for anything.

                False. All 3 of those are a kind of Name. Those 3 are all names for the same concept as "22 minutes".

                Descriptions aren't automatically names.

                Actually they are. You are confusing proper names with names.
                Any short text that uniquely identifies a specific thing can be used as the name for a thing.

                The

        • "with a periodicity of about 1,320 seconds (more commonly known as 22 minutes)"

          This part killed me, lol.

          I'm reminded of the long-running satirical news show, This Hour Has 1,320 Seconds [imdb.com].

    • by gwjgwj ( 727408 )
      It was slowing down as the author wrote the text. No need to criticize.
    • Well time isn't a universal invariant. It's moving away from us. From it's point of view it could be pulsing every 20 minutes, from ours longer.

  • White dwarf? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Meneth ( 872868 ) on Thursday July 20, 2023 @03:21AM (#63701024)
    Might be a white dwarf pulsar. Other examples include AR Scorpii [wikipedia.org] and J1912-4410 [astronomy.com].
    • Whatever the original source, nature's not great at producing randomness on those scales. Usually you'd expect the sheer amount of mass required to average everything out and make it fairly regular.

      My non-astronomer's wild ass guess would be that whatever the signal source, it's being orbited by one or more objects in a way that changes the beam angle periodically. It wouldn't take much of a shift to make it miss us completely over the kind of distances we're talking about. Orbiting objects simply occlud

      • A mulit-body interaction, with a higher number of bodies, could definitely make it look random to us, if we're expecting something else.
  • A signal since 1988, hmm? The control computer of the Dyson Sphere must probably be running Windows 2.1, which requires reboots every 20 minutes or so.

    • A Dyson sphere would hide all radiation, wouldn't it? Unless they built it with LEDs on the outside, like that new dome thing in Vegas.
      • A Dyson sphere would hide all radiation

        Except infrared. Heat must go somewhere.
        https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.096... [arxiv.org]

        • Does it have to be infrared? Suppose you're really super advanced a civilization even among those who can do Dyson spheres, could you emit the "waste heat" at a temperature of like, maybe, 20 kelvin? I.e., something close to, but above, the cosmic background radiation?

          --PM

          • Ideally you would use it for something, and that might result in it being emitted in a single direction, or in specific directions. Therefore it might be difficult to detect from a distance.

            • Ideally? Clearly you have no appreciation for modern Dyson art! :-)

            • That would require capturing the entirety of the central star's energy and being able to redirect waste heat to your liking. If their technology is so advanced, the need for a Dyson Sphere is moot.

          • Unlikely.
            A Dyson sphere captures the entirety of a star's energy output. That is a LOT of energy (for very high values of "lot"). That energy (photons and arguably heat) needs to be converted to other types of energy, a conversion which is not 100% efficient.

            Assuming a Dyson Sphere is built around a star similar to the Sun. It would receive 3.8*10^26 Watts of energy every second. Even if energy conversion is 99.99% efficient, the unused energy alone is a mere 3.8*10^22 Watts. That's about as much as 100 tim

      • A Dyson sphere would hide all radiation, wouldn't it? Unless they built it with LEDs on the outside, like that new dome thing in Vegas.

        Exterior navigation LEDs...so wayward spaceships won't run into it in the dark.

      • by Duhavid ( 677874 )

        It is a Dyson sphere with holes that are spaced about 22 minutes apart.

      • A fully-enclosed Dyson sphere would be magic in that it is probably impossible to build one, or at least so infeasible that it might as well be impossible.

        However, imagine you built one somehow, totally blocking all the output of your parent star with its shell. The interior of the shell would heat up, and that heat would eventually reach the exterior and radiate away. It can't be stopped.

        If you were to hunt for Dyson spheres, you'd look for something with the size (more or less) and mass of a star by gra

  • If they don't care about global warming, why should we?
  • by SK_CUPost ( 6471570 ) on Thursday July 20, 2023 @05:18AM (#63701164)
    The crew is jumping every 22 minutes instead of every 33 minutes -- possibly because between attacks, the Cylons are streaming half-hour TV shows with no ads.
  • Alien Christmas lights!
  • But it turns out He does play 1,320-second peekaboo!

    • You realize if you time it exact you would lose peekaboo? You can't become a champion olympics-level peekaboo player that way.

  • If you have a bunch of massive compact cosmic objects in close proximity to each other, like say 4 neutron stars in wider orbits (not yet colliding,) they could be tossing each other around in ways that the polar emission of radio points at/away from us in patterns that appear to be 'random' to us. It's actually not all that inconceivable to picture it being only 3 bodies.
  • This is the office where they go to get their flying saucer license. And that flash is the sign incrementing to read "Now Serving Number 920,001".

  • "...given that every possible explanation is terrible..."
    What?

    It's a first-observation of something, yes. But considering we've taken a 'close' look at what, about 0.000001% of the observable universe, I can pretty much guarantee that as long as we keep looking we're going to keep finding things that are NEW TO US.

    So we have discovered a radio signal with slower periodicity and lower energy than previously observed pulsars.
    (Given what we believe is going on with pulsars*) it doesn't take a rocket scientist

  • by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Thursday July 20, 2023 @11:45AM (#63702048)

    It's been since at least 1988. The data doesn't go back farther than that, it's not that it definitively started in 1988. 1988 is from when they have good observation records of it.

  • And here I thought my neighbor was randomly turning his yard light on and off all these years!

  • a burst can appear anywhere within the window and will last anywhere from 30 to 300 seconds

    Did it occur to them to write down the durations of each and every of these bursts, over a period of time? And possibly write them down as numbers in a row? And then possibly show that to some cryptolinguists and such?...

  • For some reason, the actual paper wasn't coming up as having an open access version with Unpaywall. But https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06202-5.pdf [nature.com] should work. While trying to find that, I checked some other things :

    Searching for the first author (presumably the "lead" author), I see lots of results on themes of radio searches for circular objects. Indirectly this suggests that the non-ArXiving is for some other reason than the team leader not liking ArXiv.

    FTFAbstract (link in original submiss

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