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'Extraordinary' unknown radio signal from heart of Milky Way puzzles astronomers - CNET
Oct 14, 2021 1 min, 23 secs
And, on occasion, they've detected a highly unusual radio signal -- one that does not seem to fit with any object we currently know is lurking in the cosmos.

It exhibits a range of characteristics that make it highly unusual and unlike other radio sources from the depths of the Milky Way. .

Further searches through data obtained by NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory found no X-rays associated with the signal and data from the VISTA telescope, in Chile, also showed no near-infrared signal.

What you need to know is circular polarization is a rare phenomenon in the cosmos, making this radio signal rather interesting. .

"Much less than 1% of sources are circularly polarized," says Ziteng Wang, a doctoral student at the University of Sydney, Australia and first author on the study, adding "usually polarized sources are associated with magnetic fields." .

Potentially, the magnetic field of an object is messing with the radio signal on its way to Earth.

Magnetic fields are likely associated with another kind of weird radio signal from the depths of the cosmos, known as a fast radio burst.

You can see the similarities, perhaps, but Wang points out that these signals are different from the Ghost and that FRBs last for much shorter time periods or repeat on much clearer timeframes.

There is another group of objects, known as galactic center radio transients, that might explain the Ghost, too, but Wang has reservations about this hypothesis.

"The timescale of this signal and GCRTs are different," he says, noting that these transients are still a mystery to astronomers, too, and if the Ghost is another GCRT, we're not much closer to working out what that really means. 

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