New slow repeating radio source: We have no idea what it is
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I'm normally opposed to watching commercials, but I would make an exception for some 15k year old space commercials. If anybody figures out what channel these are on, let me know?
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AI... this is the kind of stuff we should be focusing using A.I. for, and not for writing your ninth grader English essay....
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The bursts wouldn't escape the black hole's gravitational field.
PS - you can re-apply for the Nobel next year along with the EV battery-extender guy.
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carbon60Unit
Ars Centurion
Further research has decoded a signal being flashed: "12:00".
(Anyone remember The Internet Help Desk video? "We've got a serious twelve o'clock flasher here.")
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7FYR72mr0E
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The OP was suggesting the pulsar was outside the event horizon (the ergosphere) but that it's such a massive black hole that this region is still time-dilated by a factor of 40 or so.
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I'm a mathematician and not an astronomer, so this is pretty uninformed speculation, but I can't help thinking of some sort of Lorenz attractor.
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OrangeCream
Ars Legatus Legionis
Why is that incompatible with a black hole binary?
Oh you're right, that would mean its rotation is once every 21 minutes, too. So maybe a slightly different answer is that the star isn't a pulsar but passing through a dust cloud every 21 minutes.
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Or, the vehicle alarm for a spaceship in a parking orbit was accidentally set off by a passing moon’s gravity wave, and everyone on the planet below has been angrily waiting for the driver to come back already and turn the damn thing off, because they haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep in 35 of your Earth-equivalent years.
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My guess would be This Hour Has 22 Minutes but that only goes back to 1992 apparently. Maybe they rehearsed for a full 4 years prior?
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I've had mornings when I hit the snooze button several times, but for 35 years?
edit - This is also the only explanation that accounts for the varying time that the signal lasts, including occasionally getting lucky and mashing the button down just as it's about to sound.
edit - This is also the only explanation that accounts for the varying time that the signal lasts, including occasionally getting lucky and mashing the button down just as it's about to sound.
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It's Ted Covington. Worked with him for a while back in '87, got bored, shot him into space as part of a secret NASA payload.
DO NOT RESPOND TO HIS PERIODIC CALLS FOR HELP. THE PERIODICITY OF HIS SIGNALS IS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. PERIOD.
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Hot take: it's a cosmic numbers station - a galactic Dead Hand switch. Leave it be.
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Given that this phenomenon has a (known) N of 1, it's gonna be kind of tough to corral enough data to train an AI.
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Things like this is where amateur astronomers shine. Pros have to fight for time on arrays (usually). Amateurs can take existing data and sift it at their leisure looking for things the pros have missed. They can also point their own instruments at the sky and listen for as long as they want so long as Nature cooperates. Obviously they (we) usually don't usually have access to the massive radio dishes that are sometimes needed, but there's a lot you can do 'lo fi' without direct access to them.
My own thoughts is that something is likely going on with some sort of orbital resonance similar to what's happening at Jupiter between it and its moons, just on a much more grand scale (obviously with stars involved rather than just planets). If you don't know what I mean, check out Radio Jove and look up the plasma currents that flow between Jupiter's poles and its moon, Io.
My own thoughts is that something is likely going on with some sort of orbital resonance similar to what's happening at Jupiter between it and its moons, just on a much more grand scale (obviously with stars involved rather than just planets). If you don't know what I mean, check out Radio Jove and look up the plasma currents that flow between Jupiter's poles and its moon, Io.
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Don’t you hate it when the battery gets low in the hard-to-reach smoke detector?
If you let it go long enough, eventually your brain automatically tunes it out.
If you let it go long enough, eventually your brain automatically tunes it out.
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I suppose if it was every --- 42 --- minutes we would know it was Ford Prefect ...
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Could this simply be material periodically entering the innermost part of an accretion disk around a black hole and briefly being heated enough to emit enough to be detected just before being sucked in beyond the event horizon? How such a process could be so regular though is beyond me.
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Honestly, except for the frequency and intensity, this sounds very similar to Jupiter's decametric radio emissions. They are strongly modulated at the planet's rotation rate (a bit under 10 hours) and the orbital period of Io (about 40 hours), the periodicity isn't like clockwork (statistically, it is, but the time between one peak and another can vary considerably) and there is a lot of fine structure in the time-frequency spectra. That does require a conductive body, such as Io, in orbit around a body with a strong magnetic field, plus a few other things. But that's not impossible. And the source process is vastly more efficient in turning particle energy into radio emissions than the synchrotron process usually assumed in studies of pulsars.
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YetAnotherAnonymousAppellation
Ars Praefectus
It's obvious that this is a node on an interstellar token-passing network. It's a perfect fit for the traffic pattern.
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My first thought was also an elliptical orbiting companion. And maybe the pulse variability is the result of an unpredictable cloud of leftover cruft that tagged along in orbit after the last pass?
Dunno honestly, IANAP, could an non-exotic companion like a brown dwarf or a large gas giant survive for 35+ years getting overcooked and shedding material every 22 minutes? And retain orbital integrity?
Dunno honestly, IANAP, could an non-exotic companion like a brown dwarf or a large gas giant survive for 35+ years getting overcooked and shedding material every 22 minutes? And retain orbital integrity?
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Dumb guy asks: but based on Interstellar and recent modeling of black holes, can't we see the back of them anyway? won't the lensing allow it to pulse as it rotates?
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I personally know some companions in my orbit who get "over-baked" seemingly on this kind of frequency for 35+ years.
It has definitely affected their orbital integrity.
It has definitely affected their orbital integrity.
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I only came to the comments for the ancient aliens meme, and thank you arstechnica for delivering it within the first 3 posts, as I've noticed here the last couple of years meme posts usually get voted down, and true often they are overused but sometimes they are the most appropriate response to a thread.
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I'm going to ask an incredibly ignorant question, so I'm preparing in advance for the downvotes. This seems like an interesting thing, how tasked out is something like JWST that we can't point it at this signal for like an hour? Or hubble? Or any of the other funky stuff we have flying about?
Is there a long wait in general for instrument time or is it like buy a time slot?
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Here, have the non Nature pay walled version. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.10817.pdf
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Excellent question I reckon.
I'm not an astronomer, but AFAIK, Space telescopes are booked up in yearly chunks, well ahead of the year being booked. They also have lots of time not bookable, for maintenance etc, but more importantly, for interesting stuff that shows up out of nowhere.
However James Webb and Hubble can't see in radio waves, if you think you found something in infrared for JWST, or visible for Hubble, you could put in a proposal to look at this object in the next years chunk. But it sounds like they don't know exactly where to look yet.
If this thing suddenly changed it's behaviour in some dramatic way, and you could pinpoint its location, you might be able to get the "Oh my god look at this" time on the telescopes, although I don't know by what criteria the telescope people award that time.
[edited for grammar derps]
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The "AI" we have can do nothing here. Large language models like ChatGPT are just stochastic parrots, that know which word is most likely to follow in a text. Humans associate eloquent writing with intelligence so we feel LLMs are intelligent. But they sre not. They don't "understand" what the yare writing which becomes obvious as soon as the are asked to do even simple reasoning or math.
Calling LLMs AIs and pretending the are close to being general AIs is mostly PR by tech bros and former crypto bros.
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"And your OnStar policy clearly states that vessels shall be in a stable parking orbit around any stellar body, or a star itself, whilst the data from your vessel clearly shows that you are in interstellar space. Please park your vessel appropriately, or if you would like to discuss upgrading your account level I can put you through the accounts department."
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Since 1988 eh? There’s only one explanation that makes sense.. We have finally located Melmac…
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a 22 minute orbit would be quite zoomy indeed, but given how tight an object could potentially orbit a pulsar...
Did a quick check with google, current record holder for shortest orbital period is a little over 4 hours.
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