Sydney PhD student discovers 'Rosetta Stone' for mysterious radio bursts from white dwarf binary

Every 1.4 hours, somewhere in our galaxy, two stars locked in a close embrace send a precise radio pulse toward Earth — and until recently, no one could say why. A University of Sydney doctoral student, Kovi Rose, has identified the source ASKAP J1745−5051 as a magnetic binary system in which a white dwarf strips material from a companion star, with the orbital rhythm itself organizing the mysterious bursts. By reading the same phenomenon through radio waves, optical spectra, and X-rays simultaneously, Rose and his colleagues have handed astronomers something rare: not just an answer, but a gr