The three dozen antennas watch for radio waves that crash over the Earth.
Thedetection of the signal appears in the Astrophysical Journalon Oct. 12.
It was first published asa preprint on arXivin September.
The name of the strange signal is a mouthful: ASKAP J173608.2-321635.
We’re going to call it the Ghost.
Between April 2019 and August 2020, the Ghost was spotted 13 times but without any consistent timing.
“This behaviour was extraordinary.”
The team went searching for the pulsar using the Murriyang telescope at the Parkes observatory in Australia.
They came up empty.
The Ghost left little trace.
Listening in with Meerkat, the signal reappeared.
But the Ghost had morphed into something new.
No longer was the radio signal lasting for weeks, it now disappeared within a day.
Potentially, the magnetic field of an object is messing with the radio signal on its way to Earth.
That might be something as common as a dusty debris field or it could be something else entirely.
Tracing these signals leads back to a pop in of dead star known as a magnetar.
Nevertheless, magnetic fields appear to be a powerful way to mess with a radio signal.
One of the limitations of the study is the “sparse sampling” of the Ghost, Wang says.
So what is it?
I know what you’re thinking, but we never jump to the “A” word around here.
It’s almost certainlynotaliens.
It definitelyisa mystery – for now.
