A Mysterious Space Object Is Firing Signals at Earth Every 44 Minutes

Out in the cosmic wilds of our galaxy, some 15,000 light-years from our collective home, astronomers have found something that behaves like a galactic lighthouse. It’s called ASKAP J1832-0911, and…whatever it is, it sends out a pulse or blink or signal, whatever you want to call it, once every 44 minutes like it’s trying to reach out in Morse code, but very slowly.

Discovered with Australia’s ASKAP radio telescope, this peculiar beacon emits two-minute-long pulses of both radio and X-rays. That’s rare. The only reason we even noticed this extraterrestrial signal playing on two channels was dumb luck: NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory happened to be scanning the exact same patch of sky at the exact same time. It’s like tuning into an episode of I Love Lucy in 1953 and finding out it’s being simulcast in Dolby Atmos.

These signals belong to a class of space stuff called long-period radio transients, or LPTs, about which we know very little, having only discovered them in 2022. They’re kind of like pulsars, which are those rapidly spinning neutron stars that shoot energy beams from their poles. But instead of milliseconds between pulses, LPTs take minutes or even hours to pulse again.

So far, scientists have only detected about 10 LPTs, and this is the first time one has shown up on both radio and X-ray instruments. According to Ziteng “Andy” Wang, the Curtin University astronomer leading the research published in Nature, the overlap was a fluke: “It felt like finding a needle in a haystack.” Especially when you consider Chandra’s narrow gaze compared to ASKAP’s panoramic space sweep.

As for what this thing actually is, so far, the answer is just a shoulder shrug. The original theory was that it might be an ultra-long-period magnetar, but that theory’s on shaky legs, leaving ASKAP J1832-0911 as yet another in a long line of intriguing space mysteries, like so many other mysterious space signals that have been detected in recent years.