Researchers have discovered that a mysterious radio signal that has been coming from a distant region of space every two hours for the past decade comes from an "unprecedented" source, MSN reports.
These pulsations originate from a binary system containing a long-dead star, researchers say, according to the Daily Mail.
In this system, a white dwarf star and a red dwarf star orbit together at such a close distance that their magnetic fields "collide," creating a long radio pulse.
Because the orbit of these stars is regular, they produce a pulse every 125 minutes like some gigantic cosmic clock.
Researchers say the binary system ILTJ1101 is located 1.600 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Ursa Major.
The mysterious pulses were discovered in 2024 by Dutch scientist Iris de Ruiter, now at the University of Sydney.
This is the first time that a repeating long radio pulse has been discovered to come from anything other than a highly magnetized neutron star, known as a magnetar.
Initially, only one star was visible, but data soon revealed more about this strange system - one of its members is a red dwarf.
Red dwarfs are small, cooled stars about the size of a fraction of the Sun around which the Earth orbits.
This red dwarf, however, was doing something unusual - it was moving back and forth around a central point at regular two-hour intervals.
This indicated that the red dwarf was being pulled by the gravity of another, hidden star.
Calculations have shown that the second star has the mass of a typical white dwarf.
White dwarfs are dead stars that have burned all their nuclear fuel and shed their outer layers, leaving only their hot, dense core.
However, because these stars are so faint, they do not appear even in the most powerful telescopes, which explains why they have not been observed until now.
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