Scientists SOLVE the mystery of ‘alien’ signal received from outer space

Scientists have finally discovered the mysterious origins of a ‘stranger‘ signal received from space.

In 2022, a radio telescope discovered a burst of energy coming from a galaxy about 200 million light-years from Earth.

Although the burst lasted only milliseconds, it contained enough energy to dwarf entire galaxies and was believed to be a signal from an advanced alien civilization.

Now scientists at MIT have discovered that this ‘fast radio burst’ (FRB) comes from a small region very close to a rotating neutron star, the ultra-dense remnants of a dead sun.

The researchers argue that the burst must have come from the low powerful magnetic fields around the star known as the magnetosphere.

Although thousands of FRBs have been detected, this is the first time astronomers have been able to pinpoint the origin of one of these mysterious signals.

Co-author Professor Kiyoshi Masui says: ‘Atoms cannot exist around these highly magnetic neutron stars, also known as magnetars; they would simply be torn apart by the magnetic fields.

“The exciting thing here is that we find that the energy stored in those magnetic fields, close to the source, twists and reconfigures in such a way that it can be released as radio waves that we can see halfway across the universe.”

Neutron stars are formed when a star about seven to nineteen times the size of our Sun explodes in a violent supernova, leaving behind a dense core of compressed matter.

Although only a few kilometers wide, these alien stars contain up to twice as much matter as the Sun.

These stellar cores are so compact that a chunk of neutron star material the size of a sugar cube would weigh a billion tons on Earth – making them the densest objects we can directly observe.

Surrounding these strange worlds are violent magnetic fields that can be trillions of times stronger than those surrounding Earth.

Since the first FRB was spotted in 2007, researchers have detected thousands of these short but intense bursts everywhere, from our own galaxy to 8 billion light-years away.

Although these eruptions do not contain enough energy to be dangerous, they have presented scientists with a baffling mystery.

Some scientists have suggested that these could be created by the powerful magnetic fields around distant neutron stars, but not all astronomers agree.

Lead researcher Dr Kenzie Nimmo said: ‘In these neutron star environments, the magnetic fields are really at the limits of what the universe can produce.

“There has been a lot of discussion about whether this bright radio emission could even escape from that extreme plasma.”

Some models suggest that the bursts of energy are formed in the turbulent magnetosphere, while others argue that they come from much further away as part of a shock wave coming from the star itself.

In their study, published in Nature, the researchers focused on a radio pulse spotted in 2022 by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME).

Using four large radio receivers shaped like halfpipes, scientists discovered a two-millisecond pulse that was named FRB 20221022A.

Based on the highly polarized light the FRB produced, the researchers found that its source is most likely rotating – something that has been observed in rapidly spinning neutron stars called pulsars.

But to find out where exactly FRB 20221022A came from, Dr. Nimmo and her co-authors looked at a property called “scintillation.”

When you see a star in the night sky from Earth, it appears to twinkle or “twinkle” because the star’s light is filtered by gases in the atmosphere.

Yet this effect doesn’t just affect stargazers, as light from any small, bright source is bent as it passes through an obstacle such as the gases surrounding a galaxy.

The smaller and further away the light source is, the more it glitters. That’s why planets like Jupiter and Mars don’t seem to twinkle when you see them.

If the FRB came from a shock wave tens of millions of kilometers away from the neutron star, the region of origin would be so large that researchers would not expect to see any scintillation at all.

But when Dr. When Nimmo and her colleagues analyzed the energy of FRB 20221022A, they saw that the mysterious flash twinkled like a star in the sky.

Dr. Nimmo says, “This means the FRB is likely within hundreds of thousands of miles of the source.”

By identifying the gas cloud through which the flash must have passed, the researchers were able to zoom in on its origin with unprecedented accuracy.

Although the FRB emerged from a galaxy more than ten times more distant than our nearest neighboring galaxy, the researchers found that its source was in a region only 6,000 miles wide.

For comparison, that’s equivalent to the distance from Edinburgh to Cape Town, South Africa.

Professor Masui says: ‘Zooming in on an area of ​​10,000 kilometers, from a distance of 200 million light years, is like being able to measure the width of a DNA helix, which is about 2 nanometers wide, on the surface of the moon. ‘