Scientists HAVE SOLVED the mystery of an ‘alien’ signal received from space

Scientists have finally discovered the mysterious source of ‘a stranger‘ signal received from abroad.

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

Although the explosion lasted only milliseconds, it was powerful enough to outlast the entire galaxy and was said to be a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization.

Now, scientists from MIT have discovered this ‘Fast Radio Burst’ (FRB) it came from a small region very close to an orbiting neutron star, the dense remnant of a dying sun.

The researchers argue that the explosion may have come from the strong magnetic field surrounding the star called the magnetosphere.

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

Another author Professor Kiyoshi Masui says: ‘Near magnetic neutron stars, also known as magnets, atoms cannot exist – they can be torn apart by magnetic forces.

‘What is interesting here is that, we find that the energy stored in that magnet, close to the source, is being distorted and reformed so that it can be released as radio waves that we can see in the middle of the universe.’

Neutron stars are formed when a star seven to 19 times the size of our sun explodes. in a violent supernova, leaving behind a core of compressed matter.

Although only a few kilometers across, these unusual stars have twice the mass of the sun.

The bodies of these stars are so dense that a tiny neutron star can weigh a billion tons on Earth – making it the densest object we can see directly.

Surrounding these strange worlds are strong magnetic fields that can be twice as strong as those around Earth.

Since the first FRB was observed in 2007, researchers have found thousands of brief but deadly eruptions anywhere from our galaxy to 8 billion light years away.

Although these explosions are not dangerous enough, they have caused scientists a surprising mystery.

Some scientists have suggested that this could be caused by the magnetic field surrounding distant neutron stars – but not all astronomers agree.

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

‘There has been a lot of debate about whether this bright radio emission could come from a dangerous plasma.’

Some examples show that bursts of energy are created in the turbulent magnetosphere while others argue that they come from far away as part of a powerful shock from the star itself.

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

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

Based on the highly polarized light produced by the FRB, the researchers discovered that the source is circular – a feature seen in fast-moving neutron stars called pulsars.

But to find out where FRB 20221022A came from, Dr Nimmo and his co-authors looked at the ‘scintillation’ area.

When you see a star in the night sky from Earth, it appears to twinkle or ‘swirl’ because the light from the star is filtered through the atmosphere.

However, this is not limited to stargazers because the light from any small, bright source is bent as it passes through a barrier like the gas surrounding a galaxy.

The light source is so small and so far away from the light source, that’s why planets like Jupiter and Mars don’t seem to twinkle when you see them.

If the FRB came from a shock tens of millions of kilometers from the neutron star, the area where it came from would be so large that researchers would not expect to see any scintillation.

But when Dr Nimmo and his colleagues analyzed the energy from FRB 20221022A they saw that the mysterious flash was twinkling like a star in the sky.

Dr Nimmo says: ‘This means that the FRB is probably within hundreds of thousands of kilometers of the source.’

By identifying the gas cloud through which the flash must have passed, the researchers were able to trace its origin with greater precision.

Although the FRB exited a galaxy ten times the distance to our nearest galaxy, the researchers found that its source region was 10,000km (6,200 miles) wide.

For comparison, this is the same distance from Edinburgh to Cape Town, South Africa.

Professor Masui said: ‘Approaching a region 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, on the surface of the moon. ‘