They could be just very faint right now, and yet still detectable with a very sensitive instrument. "They could be lurking in a very dim, quiescent state. "I'm really hopeful that we can re-detect these three objects, figure out what they are," Hyman said. The Square Kilometer Array, currently under construction in Australia and South Africa, would be far more capable of finding GCRTs than any prior radio observatory, Hyman said. Perhaps the most famous mysterious space signal ever detected was the Wow signal, detected by the Big Ear telescope at Ohio State University in 1977. Murphy's team plans to continue listening to the galactic center with ASKAP, simultaneously looking for signs of their mystery objects in X-ray, visible, or infrared light. Whenever the US Naval Research Laboratory releases new observations of the galaxy's center, he scans them for signs of GCRTs. New observatories are monitoring the galactic center better than Hyman could in the 2000s. We don't know enough about them." A decade of searching only turned up 3 GCRTsĪn infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows hundreds of thousands of stars crowded into the dusty core of the Milky Way. "Whether these objects fall into those categories, we don't know. Nobody knows what type of star would make those unique signals, and each GCRT is different, leading researchers to believe the four signals are not coming from the same type of object.Īny new discovery "adds to the full body of knowledge that either cements what we already know, or adds to it, or really could lead to revolutionary new understandings," Scott Hyman, who led the research efforts that discovered the three prior GCRTs, told Insider. GCRTs have been a mystery for decades now. Murphy is "100% confident" that the signals aren't coming from aliens, because technological signals would cover a much narrower range of frequencies, like humans' broadcast radios do. The central region of the Milky Way galaxy, as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2009. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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