Newly discovered radio signals from the center of the galaxy could put Einstein’s theory of relativity to the test

Is there an ultra-dense core of a gigantic star lurking at the center of the Milky Way?

Scientists think they may have discovered just that. It’s a signal from a pulsar, the fast-rotating core of an ancient star at the center of our galaxy. This unusual discovery could be used to test the predictions of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Pulsars, a type of neutron star, are known as the “lighthouses of the universe” because they send out beams of radio radiation every time they rotate, and sometimes those beams pass by Earth. The suspected pulsar rotates on its axis every 8.19 milliseconds and is located near Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole with the mass of 4 million suns embedded in the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

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The researchers published their results on Monday (February 9) in The Astrophysical Journal. The study was led by Karen Perez, a postdoctoral fellow at the SETI Institute and a doctoral student at Columbia University at the time of the study.

“We look forward to seeing what follow-up studies will reveal about this pulsar candidate,” Perez said in a statement. In particular, researchers hope to use pulsars to investigate general relativity, she added.

test the laws of the universe

General relativity, first proposed by Albert Einstein, proposes that gravity is not a force of nature, but a property of the curvature of space-time.

A pulsar near the Milky Way would allow researchers to learn about “precise measurements of spacetime around a supermassive black hole,” the statement said. That’s because pulsars rotate so fast that, like other stars, they are sensitive to the subtle gravitational forces of nearby massive objects.

Study co-author Slavko Bogdanov, a research scientist at the Columbia Institute of Astrophysics, said the pulsar’s rotation could theoretically create an “anomaly” in the light pulses sent toward Earth.

“Furthermore, when a pulse moves near a very massive object, it can be deflected and cause time delays due to space-time distortions, as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity,” Bogdanov added.

Researchers detected the suspected pulsar through Breakthrough Listen, a scientific research program aimed at discovering signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. This new discovery comes from the Breakthrough Listen Galactic Center Survey, which, as the name suggests, tracks signals coming from the center of the Milky Way.

Breakthrough Listen has made all data publicly available, “enabling researchers around the world to pursue independent analysis and complementary scientific cases,” the researchers added.

Further research is needed to confirm whether the signal was really a pulsar or came from some other unusual radio source.

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