Astronomers have traced a radio signal that repeats every eight minutes to an unusual pair of stars about 5,000 light-years from Earth: a dead white dwarf spinning beside a star much like our Sun.
The system, named GPM J071507-114153, is the first known case of radio pulses coming from a white dwarf orbiting a Sun-like star, researchers at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) said. Their study appeared in Nature Astronomy.
The Murchison Widefield Array in Australia picked up 214 pulses from the source between December 2024 and September 2025. Follow-up observations with the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii confirmed the companion is a G-type star, the same class as the Sun.
The pair belongs to a group called long-period transients, objects that switch their radio signals on and off over minutes or hours. About a dozen have been found since the same ICRAR team spotted the first in 2021, and astronomers are still working out what drives them.
Earlier pulses of this kind came from white dwarfs paired with smaller, cooler red dwarf stars, the researchers said. The pulses from this system also let the team spot stellar flares erupting on the Sun-like star.
