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Slow-beating radio waves from a long-lived source

Astronomers have uncovered a source of radio waves that pulsate more slowly than expected. Meticulous records reveal that the emission has been detected for decades, highlighting the remarkable foresight of scientists in bygone years.
  1. Victoria M. Kaspi

    1. Victoria M. Kaspi is in the Department of Physics, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec H3A 2T8, Canada, and the Trottier Space Institute, McGill University, Montreal.

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Celestial objects change on a range of timescales, and understanding these scales is one of the most exciting areas of astrophysical research today. For instance, rapidly rotating, highly magnetized neutron stars, called radio pulsars, emit beams of electromagnetic radiation that pulse on timescales of milliseconds to several seconds, and can also vary on a microsecond scale (see, for example, ref. 1). Fast radio bursts2 are even shorter flashes of radio waves that appear randomly across the sky, lasting tens of microseconds to milliseconds3, whose origin is elusive at present. But astronomical timescales can also be much longer. Writing in Nature, Hurley-Walker et al.4 report a finding on a much more leisurely timescale: a radio source that pulsates with a period of 21 minutes — and that is also of unknown origin.

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Nature 619, 472-473 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02295-0

Updates & Corrections

  • Clarification 09 August 2023: An earlier version of the figure legend in this article did not explain that the red points represent upper limits of the estimates for radio sources GPM J1839−10 and GLEAM XJ162759.5−523504.3.

References

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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