Thanks to follow-up observations using optical and x-ray telescopes, the researchers were able to determine the origin of these pulses with certainty. The findings explain the source of such radio emissions found across the Milky Way galaxy for the first time.
Dr Iris de Ruiter, who received her doctorate from the University of Amsterdam in October 2024, is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sydney. During the last year of her PhD, she developed a method to search for radio pulses of seconds to minutes in the historical archive of LOFAR, the Low-Frequency Array telescope in the Netherlands.
While improving the method, Dr de Ruiter discovered a single pulse in the 2015 observations. When she subsequently sifted through more archive data from the same patch of sky, she discovered six more pulses. All the pulses came from a source called ILTJ1101.
Astronomers plan to study the ultraviolet emission of these entwined stars in detail. This will help to determine the temperature of the white dwarf and learn more about the history of white and red dwarfs.
