Re: OT: alien radio signals

On 27/11/2024 07:58, Jan Panteltje wrote:

A 2.9 hr Periodic Radio Transient with an Optical Counterpart:
  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad890e
 No good movies and music yet...(decoded that is)
But at least technical details such as frequency etc..
Some very peculiar.

It probably is something in a tight orbit around an M class star although how it manages to do what it does is an open question.
Hopefully someone will point a really big scope with time resolved spectroscopy at it and get a better idea of the internal dynamics. Unusually broadband emission so it is a bit odd.
It is likely some variant of SS433 or a white dwarf plus M class star binary but only time and better observations will tell. Linear polarised emissions means quite strong ordered magnetic fields and the temporal variation puts very tight bounds on how big it can be!
Serendipitous discovery of weird objects usually involves a bit of new physics with any luck (a la pulsars original trace marked "LGM").
--
Martin Brown