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Strange radio signal from space12/5/2023 The scientists behind the discovery explain that there are several potential non-alien explanations for the strange signal. The odd radio emissions seemed to be coming from the direction of Proxima Centauri, the closest neighboring star to our sun at 4.2 light-years away, reports The Guardian's Ian Sample last week. This fall, researchers noticed evidence of a strange radio emission while looking through archival data from 2019. “We don’t know yet, but we’re working to find out.Scientists detected a mysterious radio signal from a nearby galaxy, which begs the question-could it be aliens?Īs part of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program, astronomers working on the Breakthrough Listen project scan for radio signals that could come from some non-human intelligent life in the cosmos. “Maybe it’s something unique to the environment of this cluster, maybe it’s something specific about the merger geometry, maybe it’s a particularly unusual combination of properties,” he concluded. The ‘wrong-way’ relic challenges what we thought we knew, so we need to understand what conditions are required to generate something like this object. “Our models are only good if they continue to stand up to scrutiny, and where new data challenges that, we need to understand why. ![]() “We observers need to work with theorists closely,” Riseley said. While it will be satisfying just to get a better read on these strange objects, there are also bigger questions that could be constrained by studying the radio universe, such as the unexplained origin of cosmic magnetism. Galaxy clusters reside “at the intersections of the large-scale structure of the Universe’s Cosmic Web,” Riseley and his colleagues said in the study, which is an interconnected network of dark matter filaments of mind-boggling proportions that spans the entire universe. Many of these mysteries may be resolved with future observations from ASKAP and ATCA, as well as with an immense project known as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which will become the most sensitive radio observatory on Earth when it is completed sometime this decade. The properties of these bizarre radio sources don’t seem to fit in with our current understanding of the origin and evolution of similar structures. “This reveals gaps in our understanding of how these sources evolve-gaps that we’re working to fill.” And while they have a decent lead on where it originates, “Our best physical models simply can’t fit the data,” they wrote. I’m an observational astronomer, not a theorist, so the challenge of explaining what we see in the context of what we know (or think we know) from theory is really engaging.”Īccording to the researchers, the radio fossil is very ancient. That’s part of what makes our job so hard, yet so much fun. ![]() “ASKAP is such a game-changing telescope that any time you look at a deep image, you find something new and unusual. “There was definitely a lot of ‘what the heck?’ and ‘why does it look like that?’ kind of reaction,” he recalled. The researchers also examined a so-called “wrong-way relic,” an arc-shaped structure with an odd concave shape and other features that have never been seen in similar objects, as well as a “fossil plasma source” that was created by the powerful blasts of a bygone supermassive black hole that has since faded into darkness.Įven as seasoned radio astronomers, the team reacted to the otherworldly objects with “excitement, surprise and not a little confusion,” Riseley said. The newly observed structures in Abell 3266 include a huge radio halo that is “conclusively detected here for the first time” and contains “an extended central diffuse ‘ridge’ that we are as yet unable to classify,” according to the study.
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