For the last decade, Earth has been on the receiving end of a bizarre cosmic ping—like a telegram from the abyss—every 125 minutes. Scientists finally tracked down the source, and while it’s not little green men (yet), it’s something they’ve never seen before.
Meet ILTJ1101, a binary system 1,600 light-years away, lurking near the Big Dipper. It consists of a white dwarf—essentially the burned-out corpse of a once-mighty star—and a red dwarf, a still-glowing ember. They orbit each other so closely that their magnetic fields keep colliding, sending out a slow, rhythmic radio pulse like the ticking of some ancient, celestial time bomb.
Until now, long-pulse radio signals like this only came from magnetars—neutron stars with magnetic fields so intense they could erase your credit card from across the galaxy. This system, however, rewrites the rulebook. It’s the first time scientists have caught a white dwarf-red dwarf duo behaving like this, raising the question: How many other cosmic objects are broadcasting signals we haven’t picked up yet?
Dr. Iris de Ruiter was the first to spot these eerie transmissions in 2024 while combing through old observations from the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) in the Netherlands. Hidden in data from 2015, she found the first pulse—then six more. Each one lasted anywhere from a few seconds to a full minute, arriving with unsettling precision.
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) have been popping up in astronomical research for years—brief, high-energy flashes from deep space that still defy full explanation. But this? This is different. Slower. More deliberate. Like a cosmic lighthouse beam sweeping across the void, daring someone to notice.
Dr. Charles Kilpatrick of Northwestern University compared them to FRBs but noted the pulses are weaker and stretch out longer. If FRBs are the intergalactic equivalent of a firework explosion, these signals are more like a slow, eerie knock at the door.
As radio-astronomy improves, astronomers expect to discover more of these strange binary systems. Which, of course, begs the question—what else is out there, ticking away in the dark, waiting to be found?
Did You Know?
- White dwarfs are so dense that a sugar-cube-sized chunk of one would weigh as much as a car.
- Some scientists think fast radio bursts could be artificial signals—yes, possibly from extraterrestrials—because of their strange, structured patterns.
- Magnetars, the usual suspects for long radio pulses, have magnetic fields a quadrillion times stronger than Earth’s. If one got close enough, it could theoretically erase every hard drive on the planet.
