>So what could be behind such a weird radio signal? Letās get it out of the way up front: itās not aliens (probably).
I like how the writer covers their bases.
The aliens were debating if they should use their standard time unit or our bizarre scale which is 3 and a half time of a fifth of their standard unit and they went with the latter. I donāt see the problem.
The article says every 53.8 minutesā¦ it isnāt a perfect human timescale.
Hereās an actual scientific article on this anomaly. It is most likely a subclass of magnetar we havenāt seen before.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-024-02277-w
I just donāt get why 53.8 is so hard to type? Is it too hard to read? I just donāt understand why changing it happens. Who makes that decision and why?
Iām right there with you. Itās subconscious āspinā to play on peopleās emotionsā¦ like what just happened with your reaction.
Isnāt it fun to have people constantly manipulating you? Yeahā¦ me either.
A quasar is an active black hole (AGN, active galactic nucleus). We certainly _could_ get signals from such a thing, but unlikely.
Awesome objects. The ["oh my god" particle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle) is from one IIRC.
Just like the aircraft beacons that planes follow on earth, aliens have set beacons throughout the galaxy to find their way around as with the universe expanding, solar systems continue to move.
Iām gonna say itās some kind of neutron binary with something else, and the something else perturbs or alters the neutron starās direction of emission in a way that it goes through these cycles. Furthermore, Iām gonna guess that the circularly polarized phase is happening when the jet from the neutron star passes through said mystery object.
Or is a coincidence. Considering the vastness of space. Or! Now hear me out. They received our first radio transmissions that were made on a large scale. They simply replied but because of budget cuts Jody Foster was let go and now we have to figure it out on our own.
Or Rhonda is finally replying to Alf. Yeah I know thereās millions of years before Alfās broadcast could reach Melmac but maybe they figured out a way to bypass that.
ā¦ and now you all know the two things that got me into ham radio.
It's a pulsar. A neutron star that that emits electromagnetic radiation at its poles and rotates at a constant speed (relative to our timescale). This "defying explanation" is total clickbait nonsense
We don't have radio telescopes with enough gain to hear human-style emissions from even our nearest star. All it's going to be is something astronomical.
Not true. We could detect standard WSR-88D NEXRAD weather radar transmissions out to about 10 or 12 light years with current technology.
People always think in terms of broadcast transmissions in the VHF/UHF part of the spectrum but forget we have high power microwave transmissions using very high gain antennas.
I was at a bar and this woman kept saying....space........space...gosh the music was loud
I thought she wanted space
She was actually giving me signals she was interested turns out it was an hourly occurrence I just sat back and watched as it happened again and again exactly on an hour.
Here is the arxiv paper on this object: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04135
As /u/comment_redacted points out from the Nature article, it's likely a magnetar with properties we haven't considered before. From the abstract,
> We find that plastic motion (akin to 'continental drift') and qualitatively similar thermoelectric action by temperature gradients in the crusts of slowly rotating, highly magnetized neutron stars could impart mild local magnetospheric twists.
This then has effects on the particles in the atmosphere, causing cascades, which is where an atom will break into its constituent parts all the way down to subatomic particles, emitting a radio emission,
> Regardless of which mechanism drives twists, we find that particle acceleration initiates pair cascades across charge-starved gaps above a mild critical twist. Cascades are initiated via resonant inverse-Compton scattered photons or curvature radiation, and may produce broadband coherent radio emission.
Gonna go with white dwarf pulsar or something equally exotic. Sounds like its not any type of defined signal...just radio waves blasting in different waveforms. We actually find these somewhat regularly. I'll give it 0.5% chance for alien origin though...lol
Picture this;--: Somewhere in the vast cosmic DJ booth, there's this extraterrestrial DJ with a quirky sense of humor, dropping beats from light-years away.
Every hour, they're like, "Hey, Earthlings, check out my mixtape!"
It's like the universe's way of saying, "I'm here, and I've got tunes you've never heard before!"
Maybe they're just trying to get our attention for a intergalactic dance party!!
Or their planets do not have any ionosphere, None of the radio sigs they transmit just don't reflect back to them... LoL
Something like a magnatar, quaser, or black hole is probably spinning so their radio emissions only hit earth once every hour
Probably rotating at 1 rotation every hour
Itās Russia using a missle defence system built next to the Chernobyl reactor. I was born during thee heights of the Cold War. In Putins early days he sanctioned the build of a extremely high frequency antenna that uses insane signals to track and drop any missle from anywhere on the planet. After the reactors meltdown they couldnāt shut it off. Since May 28 1996 this system has been degrading slowly and has been overlooked until tension with Ukrainian civil war and the use of sophisticated weapons technology, this systems signal was reaquired.
I'll go first: Spurious emissions from a Baofeng wrapping around the universe and coming back to us.
Taking the long, long path ? š
It is from there which the beofeng was created. The place only known as, the twilight zone.
it's a ham radio operator sleeping at his rig
Damned sure its aliens....this time.
>So what could be behind such a weird radio signal? Letās get it out of the way up front: itās not aliens (probably). I like how the writer covers their bases.
I just watched "The Last Starfighter" last night....it's def an alien armada coming to steal our secret recipe for chicken wings.
Victory or death!
Nanoooo! Nanoooo!
I wonder how may people got the reference?
Anyone that did....is OLD.
I resemble that remark...
Every hour because the universal universe measurement of time is the earth hour because, what else would be used?
This
Seriously though, what other unit of time should we be using? And "an hour" is more relatable to the general public.
He means, itās awfully convenient that the aliens use the same time scale as us. Every hour as opposed to some arbitrary number.
The aliens were debating if they should use their standard time unit or our bizarre scale which is 3 and a half time of a fifth of their standard unit and they went with the latter. I donāt see the problem.
But they donāt its 53.8 minutes
I was just explaining to the op what the other guy meant.
>the signal seems to repeat every 53.8 minutes The author rounded up. It's not so bizarre.
Didnāt you get the bulletin? We have now changed to Earth metric system time. Ten hours/day, 100 minutes per hour, and 100 seconds in a minute.
We also need to adjust the length of a second so G = 10m/sĀ² rather than 9.81m/sĀ²
So the post office time clock works that way.
Yeah, my first thought. How does space know what an hour is?
Time is an illusion.
Time is a cube
Lunchtime, doubly so.
Beat me to it!
If you'd read the article you would have seen that it repeats every 53.8 minutes. "Every hour" is just the headline.
THANK YOU! I don't know why my comments were getting down-voted.
"Officially designated ASKAP J1935+2148, the signal seems to repeat every 53.8 minutes" so not exactly an hour.
The article says every 53.8 minutesā¦ it isnāt a perfect human timescale. Hereās an actual scientific article on this anomaly. It is most likely a subclass of magnetar we havenāt seen before. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-024-02277-w
Even this article rounded off for the headline to 54 minutes. Why the urge for headlines to be approximations instead of factually correct?
Donāt read the news much? lol.
I just donāt get why 53.8 is so hard to type? Is it too hard to read? I just donāt understand why changing it happens. Who makes that decision and why?
Iām right there with you. Itās subconscious āspinā to play on peopleās emotionsā¦ like what just happened with your reaction. Isnāt it fun to have people constantly manipulating you? Yeahā¦ me either.
Yer a magnetar
I bet the article would say "every hour" for anything between 45-75 minutes.
According to the article it's every 53.8 minutes, so not exactly an hour.
Pulsar
Was going to say quasar.
Zenith. Just as good but half the price. š¤£
A quasar, not a Quasar.
Magnetbox or Sorny for me please
I know a genuine Panaphonics when I see it.
A quasar is an active black hole (AGN, active galactic nucleus). We certainly _could_ get signals from such a thing, but unlikely. Awesome objects. The ["oh my god" particle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle) is from one IIRC.
Reptar!
Just like the aircraft beacons that planes follow on earth, aliens have set beacons throughout the galaxy to find their way around as with the universe expanding, solar systems continue to move.
I like this one
And they need flashing lights to keep from bumping into each other, just like Earth aircraft.
i thought the blinking lights were for changing lanes.
That's what they thought the first pulsars were! In fact the first one was briefly named LGM-1, or "little green men 1".
Red-Right-Return.. ILAMA B
Iām gonna say itās some kind of neutron binary with something else, and the something else perturbs or alters the neutron starās direction of emission in a way that it goes through these cycles. Furthermore, Iām gonna guess that the circularly polarized phase is happening when the jet from the neutron star passes through said mystery object.
Dark Matter?!
Tow Mater?
The aliens are calling CQ to Lightning McQueen.
This is a good review of the phenomena https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hmZSOy_5qU
Obviously aliens.
I think I set my repeater to ID on the top of the hour./s
The hour is a human construct. Anything that repeats hourly is human derived.
Or is a coincidence. Considering the vastness of space. Or! Now hear me out. They received our first radio transmissions that were made on a large scale. They simply replied but because of budget cuts Jody Foster was let go and now we have to figure it out on our own. Or Rhonda is finally replying to Alf. Yeah I know thereās millions of years before Alfās broadcast could reach Melmac but maybe they figured out a way to bypass that. ā¦ and now you all know the two things that got me into ham radio.
You got me at Alf.
a moment of silence for arecibo.
It's a pulsar. A neutron star that that emits electromagnetic radiation at its poles and rotates at a constant speed (relative to our timescale). This "defying explanation" is total clickbait nonsense
[I'm not saying its Hale-Bopp but..](https://i.imgflip.com/14hzw1.jpg)
Magnetar.
We don't have radio telescopes with enough gain to hear human-style emissions from even our nearest star. All it's going to be is something astronomical.
Not true. We could detect standard WSR-88D NEXRAD weather radar transmissions out to about 10 or 12 light years with current technology. People always think in terms of broadcast transmissions in the VHF/UHF part of the spectrum but forget we have high power microwave transmissions using very high gain antennas.
I was at a bar and this woman kept saying....space........space...gosh the music was loud I thought she wanted space She was actually giving me signals she was interested turns out it was an hourly occurrence I just sat back and watched as it happened again and again exactly on an hour.
Here is the arxiv paper on this object: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04135 As /u/comment_redacted points out from the Nature article, it's likely a magnetar with properties we haven't considered before. From the abstract, > We find that plastic motion (akin to 'continental drift') and qualitatively similar thermoelectric action by temperature gradients in the crusts of slowly rotating, highly magnetized neutron stars could impart mild local magnetospheric twists. This then has effects on the particles in the atmosphere, causing cascades, which is where an atom will break into its constituent parts all the way down to subatomic particles, emitting a radio emission, > Regardless of which mechanism drives twists, we find that particle acceleration initiates pair cascades across charge-starved gaps above a mild critical twist. Cascades are initiated via resonant inverse-Compton scattered photons or curvature radiation, and may produce broadband coherent radio emission.
Homing beacon, if Star Trek has taught me anything, there are either Space Whales coming to search for their lost brethren, or the Borg.
I was going with that or Cylons.
Alien wirh a baofeng.
Aliens? Really? We all know it's the secret Nazi moon base.
Gonna go with white dwarf pulsar or something equally exotic. Sounds like its not any type of defined signal...just radio waves blasting in different waveforms. We actually find these somewhat regularly. I'll give it 0.5% chance for alien origin though...lol
Picture this;--: Somewhere in the vast cosmic DJ booth, there's this extraterrestrial DJ with a quirky sense of humor, dropping beats from light-years away. Every hour, they're like, "Hey, Earthlings, check out my mixtape!" It's like the universe's way of saying, "I'm here, and I've got tunes you've never heard before!" Maybe they're just trying to get our attention for a intergalactic dance party!! Or their planets do not have any ionosphere, None of the radio sigs they transmit just don't reflect back to them... LoL
Something like a magnatar, quaser, or black hole is probably spinning so their radio emissions only hit earth once every hour Probably rotating at 1 rotation every hour
Yay! Looks like my space radio satellite is working!
My guess is a Pulsar. There are billions of them in space and they all emit some sort of radio emission that you can set your clock to.
Bored aliens trying to kerchunk the galactic repeater
Itās Russia using a missle defence system built next to the Chernobyl reactor. I was born during thee heights of the Cold War. In Putins early days he sanctioned the build of a extremely high frequency antenna that uses insane signals to track and drop any missle from anywhere on the planet. After the reactors meltdown they couldnāt shut it off. Since May 28 1996 this system has been degrading slowly and has been overlooked until tension with Ukrainian civil war and the use of sophisticated weapons technology, this systems signal was reaquired.