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The mystery of strange radio signals coming from space may have been solved by scientists.
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-long pulses of radio waves that are so powerful they can travel billions of light years and be picked up on Earth.
They were first discovered in 2007 and theoretical physicists like Prof Avi Loeb, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, have suggested they could emanate from alien civilisations.
Now scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have pinpointed the origins of one FRB and found it to be suspiciously close to a neutron star - an ultra-dense collapsed star that is just the size of a city but has the mass of the Sun.
The star is around 200 million light years away and is surrounded by a dense magnetic field that scientists believe is the source of the radio burst.
Dr Kiyoshi Masui, associate professor of physics at MIT, said: "Around these highly magnetic neutron stars, also known as magnetars, atoms can't exist - they would just get torn apart by the magnetic fields."
"The exciting thing here is, we find that the energy stored in those magnetic fields, close to the source, is twisting and reconfiguring such that it can be released as radio waves that we can see halfway across the universe."
Suggestion of alien civilisations
Previously, Prof Loeb had suggested that the energy busts could be a "powerful radio beam" created by alien civilisations and used for military purposes. He said they might be generated to push a light sail to launch cargo close to the speed of light.
However, many scientists believe they have more natural origins and to find out, researchers studied one particular FRB that was detected in 2022.
They determined the precise location of the radio signal by analysing its "scintillation" - similar to how stars twinkle in the night sky.
The smaller or the farther away an object is, the more it twinkles. The light from larger or closer objects, such as planets in our own solar system, experience less bending, and therefore do not appear to twinkle.
Similarly radio waves twinkle, or scintillate, as they pass through interstellar medium, giving scientists an idea of where they originated.
The team estimates that the burst exploded from a region that is very near to a rotating neutron star, around 6,000 miles away - less than the distance between London and Chicago and extremely close in space terms.
The distance puts it within the star's magnetic field, the first conclusive evidence that a fast radio burst can originate from the magnetosphere.
'Limits of what universe can produce'
Kenzie Nimmo, the lead author and a postdoctoral research fellow in MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said: "In these environments of neutron stars, the magnetic fields are really at the limits of what the universe can produce.
She continued: "There's been a lot of debate about whether this bright radio emission could even escape from that extreme plasma."
Since the first fast radio burst, astronomers have detected thousands of FRBs, whose locations range from within our own galaxy to as far as 8 billion light years away.
The burst studied by the MIT team was detected in 2022 by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (Chime) radio telescope.
The research was published in the journal Nature.