I'm the lead researcher on this study and I can honestly say: this is a great summary of our work! Thanks for producing this lovely video. And to viewers: we are working on figuring out what these things are! Literally, watch this space 😁

Sorry, I’ll get around to changing the battery. I know it’s annoying to hear that beep every 22 minutes.

Reminds me of that "mysterious radio signal" researchers were trying to decipher for 17 years that turned out to be their microwave

My fun sci-fi idea off of this is a civilization that has figured out how to create these extremely stable pulsars. They use them for timekeeping/navigation. They have to come by every so often to top it up like a generator or tend it like an actual lighthouse.

Last time something major happened every 22 minutes in space, I was caught in a time loop searching for the Eye of the Universe.

It's a "car alarm" that got false-triggered on one of the aliens' space ship while it's parked somewhere. The owner never bothered to shut it off and now it's just been "blaring away" non-stop, bothering the entire "neighborhood" for decades.

You definitely should’ve made this video 22 minutes long

It is when the signal stops that we should be worried.

It makes me so happy that there are people smart enough on this planet to know this stuff. Gives me hope for humanity.

Varying by 6 minutes is a LOT But not over 35 years. That’s basically PERFECT

00:07 Astronomers have discovered a mysterious radio signal arriving every 22 minutes for 35 years. 02:08 The radio signal source has maintained a consistent rotation period over the past 35 years. 04:10 Neutron stars are incredibly dense and have a strong magnetic field. 06:15 The pulses of light emitted by pulsars are detected as a result of a pair production cascade. 08:07 The signal is detected even though it doesn't match the properties of a pulsar in the death valley. 10:05 Astronomers have detected a radio signal from a neutron star every 1318 seconds for 35 years 12:01 The identity of the signal remains a mystery after 35 years 13:47 The source of the 22-minute signal remains a mystery despite various theories.

sounds like a 22min time loop

That would really be a shame if someone outside our Solar System was trying to talk to us but we couldn't hear them.😔

Could it be something akin to gyroscopic precession: the pulsar is spinning at a speed that makes sense, but is precessing once every 22 minutes? The earth spins around the geographic north/south poles, but those poles precess such that the Polaris will eventually no longer be the North Star. That might also explain the variations within the 6 minute signal windows: every 22 minutes we get a glimpse into the chaos caused by its rotational motion, but then it processes away from us.

The Dyson Sphere runs an ejection routine every 22 minutes. There are variations between each ejection due to the quantity of material being ejected.

I write hard sci fi and have come such a long way in my education on astromony since leaving any formal education on it, but this mystery is just so grand and beautiful that i feel any guess i could give would only bismirch the topic. Hats off to the researchers working on this ❤

The signal comes from the hot pockets in the cafeteria microwave.

Wouldn't it be possible that the pulsar is, in fact, spinning much faster but on multiple axes, resulting in this pattern? 3-dimensional rotations can give rise to some pretty complex, slowly-repeating patterns from a fixed observer PoV, and since we only have a tiny window of observation, I think it's likely that the 22-minute interval is just one of the secondary rotational axes, while we don't actively see the primary (fast) axis of rotation.

Superb! So refreshing- so many other science content is full of meandering, rambling junk and B-roll graphics that have nothing to do with a topic, that I dreaded watching any science content. You’ve restored my faith! I’m subscribing.

I gotta say these animations you have make everything so clear. Fantastic work, Alex.

Another great video. The more I think about it the more I realize (I know I’m late to the party) that anything dealing with space is all some form of archeology. Always peering into the past trying to figure out what happened. It’s lovely

Can you imagine? we finally meet aliens and they're like "It's about time, it's been thousands of years! we've been trying to reach you about your extended warranty.."

Kudos Alex. Great to hear about another quirky flaw in understanding. And good luck to Natasha. Is there an outreach page?

Yup. Battery in the receiver’s smoke detector needs changing.

Oh my gosh - I just noticed that you have MORE than 1.6 MILLION subscribers! That's awesome! I've been watching since the first 'What Hubble Saw' videos, and it's great to see the channel thrive. Good work, and congratulations! Next, 2 million subscribers!

A timed signal with 6 minutes of data every 22 minutes, that does sound like a lighthouse. There should be a lot more out there with similar characteristics. It would then work similar to GPS, but then on a galactic and extragalactic domain.

I want to devote my life to researching mysteries like this, but instead I'm stuck doing dead-end software development that is draining me. Watching this video motivates me so much.

Thank You, for this episode. The 22min, pulse is a message of LOVE!❤️❤️❤️

I remember being a child and walking out behind our house with my fathers birding telescope and looking at the night sky. KZfaq wasn't a thing back then so I'd read Sky & Telescope and Astronomy and dream of one day going into space or hearing about actual contact with aliens like in Star Trek. I think that later when I went to live as a Buddhist monk, part of the reason was that I was looking for the infinite calm that I always felt when I was alone in silence under the night sky.

Just throwing this out there... Imagine what would normally be a high-speed pulsar, but it's tidally locked on the same plane as another massive body. Rather than spin around on its axis, it's revolving around a body and pointing in our direction every 22 minutes. I imagine that's not the case, as I'm sure they've checked for potential anomalies every opposing 22 minutes (lensing, repeated fluctuations of anything, etc), but it's fun to imagine. Thanks for another wonderful video to contemplate.

Wormhole! Or, a star that is swirling around a black hole, time dilated and stuck sending us an alert each time it loops around it's black hole. The star is long dead, but were getting signals that escape orbit from the black hole every 22min

Absolutely loved this video, understood none of it, but it was awesome to learn

I think its gotta be a gravitational interaction between 2 bodies. Any more and it would be less stable, and if the lense from (probably) a black hole was aligned to our point of view, the signal could be amplified around the event horizon much like galaxies do to each other. It would have to be just right but hey, we have 400,000,000,000 samples in our galaxy to work with, some will end up being just right to look weird

I can't help but think of Outer Wilds.

This is the song I listen to when I’m trying to clear my mind haha for a moment I thought my playlist was playing on another device. Good choice and great video!

Thing is, with mysterious radio signals call out at regular time intervals, the Earth's rotation and movement about it or if it causes advancements and delays of the signal rival so it's very easy to ascertain if it actually is coming from outer space.

They must think we've put them on hold.

As I understand it, the Chandrasekhar Limit is about a too-small-to-supernova neutron star, pulling a constant stream of matter off a red giant neighbor, until it absorbs exactly the right mass to go boom. This is why Type Ia supernovae are interesting to study; they all happen with essentially the exact same conditions, so the amount of light emitted should be the same. Could this be something similar, where Pulsar 1 has a neighbor that only deposits material slowly (like another pulsar which never points at earth, but points at Pulsar 1), and Pulsar 1 is close enough to be in the jet of emitted particles? It collects particles until it’s enough to go “pop”, bright enough to see from Earth, regular enough that it would pop regularly, but slow enough that it would take many, many revolutions of Pulsar 1 to emit them? Pulsar nova? (Like stellar nova, smaller than supernova, like a starquake from deposited material instead of internal shifting)

This is awe-inspiring. Every time I watch Astrum I learn something new. Thank you so much for helping us space-clueless folks to understand the Universe a little more.

There are a few examples of blinking objects in space, which are thought to be pulsars. The signal here could be one of these. It takes a few minutes to build up the energy, we see the release of energy, and the cycle repeats like a pressure valve in an extremely balanced system.

Finally!! Worthwhile merch! Those image plates are incredible. Well done. Thank you for contributing something of substance.

Absolutely fascinating video!! And I love this type of mystery, how it forces us to challenge our assumptions and understand the universe better. I'm really curious to find out what this signal turns out to be

Thanks for a great video. I have always battled to get my mind around how pulsars actually produce the beams and you explanation and diagrams are amazingly clear. In fact, this video needs more than one viewing for me.

That Ash Twin Project is working overtime.

It was really nice to listen to your voice and have that lovely music in the background. I found the music quite moving at times. And to hear you speak of such mysterious yet quite real phenomena made me decide to like and subscribe. 🙂

Perhaps it something irregular orbiting a massive body (every 22minutes) and the massive body is lensing something that irregular object is emitting. Something like a broken planet, or a group of bound asteroids like Trojans. I think orbital periods are more stable than rotational periods of objects like neutron stars which decay due to interactions with their surroundings. As long as the emission source on the object is not directly interacting with it's surrounding too much, it might not be slowed. (what happens to the emissions after would have none)

Cool to see Cabo da Roca in Portugal at 7:08! The westernmost point in continental Europe and the Eurasian landmass.

Alex, an excellent presentation with many thanks.

This is awesome! I hope and presume that some teams of brilliant folks have already jumped into looking for patterns in the signal variations (shown at 1:15 into this video) in all the data collected over the years. Such variations in contrast to the precise rotation rate seem especially intriguing.

What if the pulsar is spinning so fast that it is surpassing the sensitivity of our sensors and creating a "rolling shutter" effect?

I spoke to a mate of mine who lives considerably closer to this 'phenomenon' he said that it was actually orbiting a blackhole, apparently where he lives they have to duck and cover every 9.62 lombs (22 minutes our time). Mystery solved!

the variations in duration of time seems to be that it might simply be something blocking the signal for part of the time... like when there is an eclipse.

Has this signal been tested for patterns and/or repetition over the years? Perhaps there's even more to this mystery. It has been proposed that using pulsars in unconventional ways could be a technosignature of some sort.

I am fascinated by this! Something new, mysterious and very thoughtfully presented. Thank you, Alex!

@Astrum is one of the best KZfaq channels!! 😎 Keep up the awesome work mate !!

22 minute orbit around a black hole or other large mass. The 6 minute window is where it passes it’s axis across the alignment

How do you find the will to keep making videos with comment sections like this? I would have serious difficulty, even when factoring in the ad revenue as a motivator.

Thank you, Alex! You never disappoint. 👍♥️

Well, if you ask me .... I believe it is Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars putting on a show somewhere in the universe. Since he plays his guitar with his left hand, it takes a bit longer to receive the signal ....well, maybe.

Those Displates look legitimately awesome. I've always been a huge fan of Uranus, long before I learned all the jokes people make about its name. It breaks my heart that such a gorgeous planet has been graced with little more than a flyby from Voyager II.

When you hit the like button so fast YT lags and you have to press it again.

Great video Alex! Has anyone tried making sense of the individual bursts as packets of infirmation? Ummmm, CONTACT-style? Would be funny to discover a hidden signal featuring the coronation of Queen Elizabeth but vastly amplified. "We see youuuuuu.... and you wear funny hats"

Any possibility that the signal is being causes not by one body, but by two or more bodies? That might explain the long delay between pulses rather than a slow rotation single body or some extremely complicated rotational scenario.

Maybe a Pulsar sitting next to a supermassive blackhole? Pulsar is producing a signal far more frequently than 22 minutes but a decent number of them are being warped out of alignment with Earth. So we only see the ones that happen during a tiny window when the two objects rotate such that the Pulsar beam is aligned with Earth and the path is free from the effects of its neighbor blackhole.

Maybe it's the Eye of the Universe ?

My Outer Wilds bros know exactly what these signals are but will tell no one cause spoilers

It's a homing beacon for the ones who helped build the pyramids. They overstayed, used too much of the dilithium crystals helping hoomans build cool things out of giant rocks, and then tried to get back home, but ran out of gas, and now they are calling the intergalactic AAA. Some of them stayed behind, and today we know them as the common house cat. That's why they are always trying to get on our laptops. They are covertly hoping that if enough of them lay on our keyboards, they'll figure out how to get the meowthership home.

These videos are very soothing and intriguing. I love them!

Maybe instead of simply switching off at a certain point in the 'Valley of Death' maybe it sometimes tapers off - or hits a lower energy state with longer wavelengths and lower intensity, such that the frequency shifts out of X-ray and it stops slowing down quickly because it's no longer emitting nearly as much energy

A completely normal pulsar orbiting a black hole seems like a pretty trivial explanation of what's happening. It explains the shift in frequency, and also the stability (it's really rotating much faster, just slows down because of relativity)

Messages of different lengths according to what is being communicated. Communications across interstellar distances using such bandwidths might be theoretically feasible. At least it's theoretically possible.

Maybe something is rotating around the pulsar every 22 minutes, It aligns with the times the pulsar would send waves our direction and by pure coincidence blocks the signal. However every 22 minutes there is a window will allows the signal. The object rotating could also be acting like a mirror and redirecting the signal towards us every 22 minutes. Either way this video was interesting and really good. Always good to watch videos like this every few years to know what people have discovered about space

What would we expect from a neutron star orbiting a black hole? How close to a black hole would a neutron star be to slow the perceived pulse rate? Is there an orientation of the pulsar and black hole that would explain the two different signals?

Was it ever considered that it is a binary system, a pulsar and a black hole at an equilibrium? Black hole might be the reason for a significant slowdown of the pulsar's rotation, as well as a stable release of its energy, but not a change in speed.

What about a wobble from gravitational torque? If the star, for example, has a 4 degree wobble, and we are at say 2 degrees off its pole, and it had a 22 min cycle to its wobble, we would only detect a pulse every 22 min. What is the duration of the signal every 22 min?

Very well presented, good work thank you.

What if the magnetic axis of the pulsar was very close to the spin axis, and slower-rate effects like precession are what is causing the beam to point in our direction every 22 minutes?

Our team came over some of the data, the signal sent data with a type of compression we had never before seen, however it was not there for the reason of making it any harder uncompress, it just took a few weeks to understand the basics. The signal which has been repeated, has actually been repeated in parts, thats why it sometimes give much shorter bursts than other times.... We looked over it by several different decoding tool. For fun we translated it to what would have been text and numbers and to med they just dont make any sense they are 4 8 15 16 23 42. Havent a clue what could be the meaning of it.

Meet L, a very simple but large and stable system. Then meet system S, which is many times smaller than L and rotates around L. S is a multi-component system (like a binary star or a solar system) and rotates around L once every 22 minutes. The pulse-emitting component(s) of S is/are only in position to transmit pulses to Earth during the same 6.5 minute segment of it's 22 minute rotation path around L. Intricacies inside of S (perhaps single- or multi-object pulse eclipses) are responsible for the erratic pulsing behavior inside the 6.5 minute window.

Is the light redshifted? It could be a high-velocity pulsar moving away from us where the slowdown in its period perfectly coincides with the rate of space expansion. Would be a one in a billion chance, but hey, there are a lot of stars out there :) The variations in signal could be caused by different objects along the path to us.

Could it not be a normal pulsar, but one which has spin around two axes at very different rates? One spin is our detected slow spin which brings the beam over us every 22 minutes; the other a higher rate spin which accounts for the different pulse lengths and inter-pulse gaps of the actual blips?

I had a weird epiphany not long ago. I was going home late and looked at the clear moon over a valley, hanging there, clear in sight. I suddenly had the massive realization and understanding of exactly what it was, it's place and size, everything. I saw it for what it was, I don't know how else to describe it. An extremely massive ball, so massive that we can see it from here, which if plunged into Earth would simply be the end of everything. Yet also awe inspiring in its own right, so much unexplored territory, its own valleys and mountains, and so cold and alone. But an actual "super massive" object floating very (relatively) close in our sky. Don't know how to say it. Just, been going my whole life, I mean I've seen it - we all have - but I didn't really pay _attention_ to it.

I wanted to thank you for dispensing with the hyperbole that the other so-called space channels have I have unsubscribed from them but you still have my subscription Thank You for Your Excellence

There are probably multiple different bodies at play here that are interacting with one another. Switch the perspective and it would probably make a lot more sense. Kind of like those really weird camera parallax effects. As soon as you change your perspective, you realize what's really going on.

How does it always hit us if we're constantly moving through space? Is it inverse square law? Would our radio waves eventually be a beam through space like this (without the intervals)?

0:11 they know the rules and so do I.

This is so interesting. Thanks for tickling my mind!

aw, gosh darn it! those darn hearthians - they've activated the ash twin project!

What if it’s a magnetar orbiting a black hole in a 22 minute orbit? That could easily create the orbital regularity and the variability as it interacts with the edge of the accretion disk. You could test this hypothesis by looking for an 11-minute Doppler shift in the signal.

What about precession or a wobble to its rotational axis (like Earth's)? For example, It's actually rotating at a much higher speed, but exactly every 22 minutes, the wobble or precession tilts the pulsar's beam in our direction for exactly six minutes, during which other wobbles or even chaotic rotationally-derived variances lead to the diverse signal detections during that time... I feel like this could be modeled and hypothetically explain this without implying such a slow rotation.

22 minutes…Outer Wilds anyone?!

An idea: we had an ancient civilisation that was capable of sending probes, this is a health or distress signal that is being sent since thousands of years using an ancient / forgotten time format (not 24h based for example)

Excellent video. Thanks for taking so much time to explain these fascinating matters to thickos like me 😂.

Strange stuff, but very interesting. Thanks!

I am sure someone has already suggested that something between the pulsar and us is opnening up our view of the pulsar every 22 minutes regardless of where the pulsar is in its own particular and complicated dance. ..and that the pulsar isnt really a pulsar. So i see it as someone opening the blinds every 22 minutes to give us a view of what is on the other side.

Maybe a binary pair of two highly magnetic pulsars with an orbital period of 22 minutes, neither or their jets aligning precisely towards earth, however a magnetic (or gravitational) interaction occurs at the same point in each orbit that bends one of their beams towards earth.

Our ignorance of the universe is greater than our total knowledge.

I wish there was a way for us to truly see and know the beauty of this universe. It's amazing to be part of the universe - looking at itself. I'm thankful we get a window seat at least. What I think is amazing, is that there is a material/matter/physical surface that does this. Before it was a poofy star full of plasma with a surface tension of thick water. A big behemoth becomes the strongest little guy in the universe. And below the surface of the neutron star? A sea of gluons/strange matter? Or multi hardened layers consisting of the idea of an onion but the layers are different types of strange diamond materials? Will we ever get to peel back the layers?

This was all extremely fascinating! It was also completely over my head. ;)

What if the pulsar is spinning faster as ti should be, but the signal gets partially blocked or filtered by some object(s), which we have not yet detected, that makes it appear every 22 minutes, instead of say.... every 6 minutes?