The source of the mysterious radio signal is 47 Tucanae, an ancient object visible to the naked eye.
ACTA, a network of radio telescopes operated by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO – Australia), has detected an extremely faint radio signal coming from a location 15,300 light-years away from Earth.
47 Tucanae star cluster and the location of the strange radio signal – (Photo: CSIRO).
According to Sci-News, the signal was filtered from 450 hours of observational data from ACTA, targeting the ancient 47 Tucanae star cluster.
This globular cluster spans a diameter of up to 120 light-years and is one of the brightest star clusters in the sky, located in the constellation Tucana in the southern hemisphere.
A research team led by Dr. Arash Bahramian from Curtin University and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Australia stated that 47 Tucanae is a world composed of tens of thousands to millions of stars gathered into a sphere.
This is how stars in the universe experience their “old age,” making globular clusters very ancient and regarded as “fossils” from the dawn of the universe.
The research team proposed two hypotheses. There are no aliens here, but there are other intriguing possibilities.
The first possibility is that the radio signal originates from a medium-mass black hole, a type of black hole that is extremely rare and shrouded in many mysteries of the universe.
The second possibility is that it is a pulsar, a type of rapidly spinning neutron star that emits radio signals all around. Neutron stars are the “remnants” of giant stars that have once collapsed.
“A pulsar near the center of this star cluster would also be a fascinating scientific discovery as it could be used to search for an undiscovered central black hole,” the authors noted.
The discovery of the strange radio signal has just been published in a scientific paper in the Astrophysical Journal.
