For years, Earth has been picking up a strange radio pulse every two hours from deep space. Not random noise—something structured, precise, and persistent. Now, scientists have traced its origin to a source unlike anything seen before.
The pulse is coming from a binary star system 1,600 light-years away in the direction of the Big Dipper. A white dwarf and a red dwarf are locked in an intense orbit, so close that their magnetic fields smash together. That cosmic collision generates a long, repeating radio burst every 125 minutes—like clockwork.
Until now, signals like this only came from highly magnetized neutron stars, known as magnetars. This discovery shatters that assumption. If one binary system can produce these signals, how many others are out there doing the same?
The breakthrough started in 2024 when Dr. Iris de Ruiter, now at the University of Sydney, combed through old telescope data. She found a pulse from 2015 buried in the archives of the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a powerful radio telescope in the Netherlands. Then she uncovered six more. The pulses weren’t just repeating—they followed a strict pattern.
Unlike the explosive fast radio bursts (FRBs) that researchers have been chasing, these pulses are slower and steadier. They last from a few seconds to a full minute, arriving like the ticking of an interstellar metronome.
Dr. Charles Kilpatrick of Northwestern University points out that while these pulses resemble FRBs, they’re weaker and longer-lasting. That makes them rare—at least, until now. If scientists keep digging, more of these cosmic signals might be lurking in the data.
This discovery raises bigger questions. How many binary systems are out there churning out radio pulses? Could signals like these explain other mysterious bursts from space? And if we’re just now identifying them, what else have we been missing?
One thing’s certain—space just got a lot louder.
Five Fast Facts
- The Big Dipper isn’t a constellation—it’s actually part of Ursa Major, one of the largest constellations in the night sky.
- White dwarfs are the remnants of dead stars, packed so tightly that a teaspoon of their material would weigh tons.
- LOFAR, the radio telescope used in this discovery, spans multiple countries across Europe, making it one of the most powerful low-frequency observatories on Earth.
- Magnetars, previously thought to be the only sources of long radio pulses, have magnetic fields trillions of times stronger than Earth’s.
- Fast radio bursts (FRBs) can release more energy in a fraction of a second than the Sun emits in an entire year.
