As astronomers survey the universe, they often encounter signals without a clear source. Although they usually find the source, some answers are weirder than others—take, for example, the mysterious pulses from a star that’s already dead.
Beginning in late 2024, the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Australia detected GPM J071507−114153, a radio signal that pulsated roughly every eight minutes. From December 2024 to September 2025, the MWA detected 214 pulses from the source, and astronomers classified the signal as a long-period transient. In a study published today in Nature Astronomy, researchers reported the most likely source for this signal: a binary star system consisting of one white dwarf—the leftover core from a star’s death—and a G-type star like our Sun. The astronomers say it’s the first detection of radio pulses emanating from a white dwarf orbiting a Sun-like star rather than a red dwarf.
“It’s amazing that by using radio wavelengths we can detect the storms on a star over 5,000 light-years away,” Natasha Hurley-Walker, a corresponding author of the study and an astronomer at Curtin University in Australia, said in a statement.
Long-period transients are a relatively new category of space signals. Scientists first got wind of this type of radiation in 2005, but it was in 2022 that the community really started to study long-period transients.
