Photo: NASA/Aurore Simonnet (Sonoma State University)
Our search for intelligent extraterrestrial life is yet to come up with definitive proof that there is such a thing in the vastness of space. Although mathematically speaking there's a good chance that's so, our instruments haven't been able to track down another civilization, despite the occasional mystery that gets our blood pumping.
One of the best clues pointing to an alien civilization is the presence of some repetitive, structured signal that may indicate sentient activity. It's something we’ve come across several times before, but each of these findings have proven to be natural occurrences of events so bizarre they're very hard for us to understand.
The latest repetitive signal to get scientists all worked up comes from a galaxy impossibly named 2MASX J21240027+3409114. It's a place so far out our minds twist and bend when trying to process the number: one billion light years away, in a constellation called Cygnus.
The galaxy has at its core two black holes that combined come in at 40 million times the mass of the Sun. They are separated by a distance of only 16 billion miles (26 billion km), and they're on the verge of merging over the course of the next 70,000 years.
The pair is spectacular in itself, but it probably would not have caught our eye if it weren't for the recurring, regular wink coming our way from out there. A wink that manifests itself every 60 to 90 days or so, and it is described by scientists as a "very weird event."
The occurrence is so strange that it even got its own name: AT 2021hdr. It was first detected back in 2021 by the people working at the at the California-based Palomar Observatory's Zwicky Transient Facility.
When it came on our radar, the phenomenon was considered a supernova, but further outbursts the following year made people think about other explanations. The list included it being the byproduct of some unknown activity in the galactic center, or the destruction of a star that came too close to one of the black holes, triggering a tidal event.
The tidal event theory is still on the table, only it is now attributed not to an exploding star, but to a gas cloud that's bigger than the binary black hole system itself. The theory belongs to a research team led by astrophysicist Lorena Hernández-García, and relies on data gathered with help from the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a telescope that launched back in 2004.
The team says it is confident that the signal from the two black holes is caused by their effect on a huge gas cloud that has engulfed them. As the two orbit each other (because of their close proximity an orbit is completed in about 130 days), the black holes eat up the gas and perturb it (including by ripping it apart and turning it into filaments of heated gas), which leads to the oscillating light pattern coming from the binary. This happens when some of the dense and hot gas close to the black holes is ejected on each rotation of the system.
The findings of the research were published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, but that doesn't spell the end of the story. The team behind it plans to continue to look at AT 2021hdr "to better understand the system and improve their models."
The latest repetitive signal to get scientists all worked up comes from a galaxy impossibly named 2MASX J21240027+3409114. It's a place so far out our minds twist and bend when trying to process the number: one billion light years away, in a constellation called Cygnus.
The galaxy has at its core two black holes that combined come in at 40 million times the mass of the Sun. They are separated by a distance of only 16 billion miles (26 billion km), and they're on the verge of merging over the course of the next 70,000 years.
The pair is spectacular in itself, but it probably would not have caught our eye if it weren't for the recurring, regular wink coming our way from out there. A wink that manifests itself every 60 to 90 days or so, and it is described by scientists as a "very weird event."
The occurrence is so strange that it even got its own name: AT 2021hdr. It was first detected back in 2021 by the people working at the at the California-based Palomar Observatory's Zwicky Transient Facility.
When it came on our radar, the phenomenon was considered a supernova, but further outbursts the following year made people think about other explanations. The list included it being the byproduct of some unknown activity in the galactic center, or the destruction of a star that came too close to one of the black holes, triggering a tidal event.
The tidal event theory is still on the table, only it is now attributed not to an exploding star, but to a gas cloud that's bigger than the binary black hole system itself. The theory belongs to a research team led by astrophysicist Lorena Hernández-García, and relies on data gathered with help from the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a telescope that launched back in 2004.
The team says it is confident that the signal from the two black holes is caused by their effect on a huge gas cloud that has engulfed them. As the two orbit each other (because of their close proximity an orbit is completed in about 130 days), the black holes eat up the gas and perturb it (including by ripping it apart and turning it into filaments of heated gas), which leads to the oscillating light pattern coming from the binary. This happens when some of the dense and hot gas close to the black holes is ejected on each rotation of the system.
The findings of the research were published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, but that doesn't spell the end of the story. The team behind it plans to continue to look at AT 2021hdr "to better understand the system and improve their models."
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