Scientists have detected a mysterious 'heartbeat' coming from our sun
Niamh Spence
Featured Image Credit: Jan Nelson/Wavebreak Media ltd/Alamy Stock Photo
Space just gets weirder and weirder as now scientists have detected a mysterious 'heartbeat' from the sun at the centre of our solar system.
Yes that's right - the sun is emitting a signal that sounds eerily like a heartbeat.
The beating style signal repeats every 10 to 20 seconds, and has been pinpointed by experts to a C-class solar flare located 3,106 miles above the star's surface.
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The scientists behind the unique discovery, a team led by the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), said uncovering the source of the heartbeat - the solar flare - could help scientists better understand how disastrous solar storms are released.
Astronomer and co-author of the study Sijie Yu, said: "This beating pattern is important for understanding how energy is released and is dissipated in the Sun's atmosphere during these incredibly powerful explosions on the sun."
Ultimately, Yu says the study's findings cast fresh light on an important phenomenon underlying the reconnection process that drives these explosive events.
Solar radio bursts are intense bursts of radio waves from the sun, which are often associated with solar flares and have been known to feature signals with repeating patterns.
These observations showed a repeating signal pattern, which leading author Yuankun Kou, a Ph.D. student at Nanjing University (NJU) likened to a heartbeat.
Kou explained: "The repeating patterns are not uncommon for solar radio bursts. But interestingly, there is a secondary source we did not expect located along the stretched current sheet that pulses in a similar fashion as the main QPP source.
"The signals likely originate from quasi-repetitive magnetic reconnections at the flare current sheet. This is the first time a quasi-periodic radio signal located at the reconnection region has been detected.
"This detection can help us to determine which of the two sources caused the other one."
This news isn't the only revelation from space recently, as the universe has also realized that the moon is drifting slowly further from Earth.
The moon has been in existence for four and a half billion years according to estimations, and now it seems like it's had its fill of us and has been trying to distance itself.
This incredible discovery was made thanks to reflective panels installed on the moon back in 1969 during the Apollo mission, which has allowed NASA to measure the distance between Earth and the moon and to see that ultimately the difference is getting bigger.
They found that about 2.46 billion years ago, the moon was around 60,000km closer to Earth than it is now, which would have resulted in 17 hour days on the planet.