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There is something strange in the cosmic neighbourhood. An unknown object in the nearby galaxy M82 has started sending out radio waves, and the emission does not look like anything seen anywhere in the universe before.
"We don't know what it is," says co-discoverer Tom Muxlow of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics near Macclesfield, UK.
The thing appeared in May last year, while Muxlow and his colleagues were monitoring an unrelated stellar explosion in M82 using the MERLIN network of radio telescopes in the UK. A bright spot of radio emission emerged over only a few days, quite rapidly in astronomical terms. Since then it has done very little except baffle astrophysicists.
It certainly does not fit the pattern of radio emissions from supernovae: they usually get brighter over a few weeks and then fade away over months, with the spectrum of the radiation changing all the while. The new source has hardly changed in brightness over the course of a year, and its spectrum is steady.
Yet it does seem to be moving – and fast: its apparent sideways velocity is four times the speed of light
Could the object be a black hole? It is not quite in the middle of M82, where astronomers would expect to find the kind of supermassive central black hole that most other galaxies have. Which leaves the possibility that it could be a smaller-scale "microquasar".
Originally posted by MysterE
Yet it does seem to be moving – and fast: its apparent sideways velocity is four times the speed of light
But what could this be?
A scientist has created a gadget that can make radio waves travel faster than light. Einstein predicted that particles and information can't travel faster than the speed of light, but phenomena like radio waves are a different story, said John Singleton, who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The polarization synchrotron combines the waves with a rapidly spinning magnetic field, and the result could explain why pulsars — which are super-dense spinning stars that are a subclass of neutron stars — emit such powerful signals, a phenomenon that has baffled many scientists.
Originally posted by ALOSTSOUL
How many light years away is galaxy M82?
And in which direction is the object moving?
Messier 82 (also known as NGC 3034, Cigar Galaxy or M82) is the prototype nearby starburst galaxy about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. The starburst galaxy is five times as bright as the whole Milky Way and one hundred times as bright as our galaxy's center.
Originally posted by wylekat
You know what's missing?
The signal itself for people to hear. I want to hear it, how about anyone else?
Originally posted by ALOSTSOUL
Wow very intresting. They say the objects moving four times the speed of light..............I thought nothing could travel faster than the speed of light:puzeace.