Scientists Can't Explain This Radio Signal #science #universe

Added: 2026-06-06

[00:00:00]Scientists discovered a signal from deep space that repeats every 22 minutes and nobody knows what it is. The astronomers were no strangers to such repeating signals. They typically come from pulsars, neutron stars which send intense pulses of light across the universe as they rotate on their axis.

[00:00:20]But as they began to look deeper into records of past observations, they realized this signal had been arriving at Earth since at least 1988 with remarkable stability, far more stable than is expected for a pulsar rotating every 22 minutes. If it was a neutron star, it was unlike any they had seen before. So where was this signal coming from?

[00:00:47]I'm Alex Mccoan and you're watching Astramm. Join me today as we grapple with the mystery that lies behind this signal which will challenge our understanding of some of the most awe inspiring objects in our cosmos.

[00:01:02]The location of the source named GPMJ1839-10 is roughly 18,000 lighty years away. Its signal arrives as pulses that can last any amount of time between 30 seconds and 5 minutes. These pulses can appear at any time in a window of just over 6 1/2 minutes, which is centered on 22 minutes after the previous pulse. To us, this may seem like a great deal of variation. 30 seconds and 5 minutes are very different durations, and the pulse arrival varying by over 6 minutes doesn't paint a picture of a very stable source.

[00:01:42]But neutron star dynamics can be very complicated and if the source is indeed a neutron star then many factors can affect the duration and arrival times of the pulses that we receive.

[00:01:54]Nevertheless, the astronomers were able to spot this signal hiding in data from the last 35 years and used this expanded data set to average out the fluctuations.

[00:02:05]They calculated that the source was rotating once every 21 minutes and 58 seconds as well as how much it had slowed down. But to their surprise, they calculated that this rotation period remained unchanged over the past 35 years. Even though it is expected that the source will slow down as it radiates energy into space, we can only say for sure that if the source has slowed down, its rotation period would not have increased by more than 0.28 milliseconds over the 35- year period because otherwise we would have been able to detect this in our data. This is an absolutely minuscule amount and it shows that whatever the object is is spinning with remarkable stability.