The core of the Milky Way is that area of the galaxy where the highest diversity of stars exists. Therefore, it could also be the region that has the highest chances of hosting alien life. It’s a fairly reasonable assumption that most stars in the galaxy and in the Universe, in general, have planets revolving around them.
Mysterious signals coming from the depths of the Cosmos don’t represent anything new, as they gave the chance for astronomers and other people to speculate that extraterrestrial beings might be trying to ‘say hello.’ As for the signal coming from the Milky Way’s core that we’ll be talking about today, it seems that it doesn’t have anything to do with aliens, as far as astronomers know.
Could the Galactic Center Excess be coming from neutron stars?
The Galactic Center Excess is the mysterious gamma-ray signal coming from the core of the Milky Way that also makes the subject of this article. Scientists from the Australian National University (ANU) propose a new explanation for the signal: a specific type of neutron star that’s rapidly rotating might be its true origin.
Roland Crocker is a co-author of the new study, and he explained as SciTechDaily.com quotes:
Our work does not throw any doubt on the existence of the signal, but offers another potential source,
It is based on millisecond pulsars — neutron stars that spin really quickly — around 100 times a second.
Scientists have previously detected gamma-ray emissions from individual millisecond pulsars in the neighborhood of the solar system, so we know these objects emit gamma-rays. Our model demonstrates that the integrated emission from a whole population of such stars, around 100,000 in number, would produce a signal entirely compatible with the Galactic Center Excess.
The new findings were published in Nature Astronomy.
