re: A space object is firing signals at Earth every 44 minutes.

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pulsar

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Can you pick up the signal with this TV?



It a Quasar TV for you young ones.


Or it could be the time sync signal for a pulsar watch.

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This predates organized human civilization.

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A light year is a measurement of distance not time

they were able to zoom in to see the source from ASKAP

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Quasar. It’s always a quasar.

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A quasar is an extremely bright galactic core. The closest known quasar is 600 million light years away. This is a star in the Milky Way, only 15,000 light years away. It’s not a quasar.

Maybe you meant pulsar, which would make more sense. It’s not a traditional pulsar but is probably some other type of exotic neutron star (possibly in a binary system). I think the thing that’s puzzling scientists, other than the x-ray emission, is how slowly these “long period radio transients” appear to be rotating.

Here we go

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A light year is a measurement of distance not time

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…right, it’s the distance light travels in a year. Which means the light we see today originated 15,000 years ago. Before human civilization existed.

You can actually take it a step further - if it were a “signal” (it’s not) from a civilization 15,000 light years away who was monitoring Earth, they would be have seen our planet as it existed 30,000 years ago when the signal was first sent. That would have been near the peak of the last ice age.

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186,282 miles is the best estimate of that distance over one second (time), right?

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FIFY

Yo umay have something there - SR J2144–3933, one of the slowest rotating pulsars known has a rotation period of about 8.5 seconds



44 secs is SLOWW

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It could be tumbling in such a way that the beam only points our way once every 44 minutes

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I don’t claim to be an astrophysicist so I don’t know whether the physics check out for that or not. I don’t think a spherical object like a star can really “tumble” unless there is, for some reason, an uneven mass distribution. But again I’m not an astrophysicist.

I just know it’s extremely odd, as radio pulsars typically have periods on the order of ~0.2-2 seconds and the radio emissions basically stop once the rotation slows down past that. X-ray pulsars in binary systems can be slower but I don’t think anyone has come up with a model that explains a 44-minute period.

It seems the working theory (from what I’ve read) is that there’s some sort of exotic interaction between binary stars occurring.

Did I miss in the article how fast the signal was traveling? I know signals can travel light speed, but if it were slower than light speed it could be even older which is cool