A little over a year ago, scientists in Australia picked up a brief burst of electromagnetic radiation. The pulse was so strong that it eclipsed all other signals coming from the sky, but its origins were unknown. After digging through the data, the team discovered that the source wasn\u2019t a distant celestial object but rather a zombie satellite left to orbit Earth with no purpose.<\/p>\n
NASA\u2019s Relay-2 launched on January 21, 1964, two years after its predecessor, Relay-1, was sent to orbit. The pair were experimental communications satellites that carried onboard experiments to map the trapped radiation belt, otherwise known as the Van Allen radiation belts. Relay-2 continued to operate until June 9, 1967, when its two transponders failed, and it wasn\u2019t heard from again until it let out a short-lived signal nearly 60 years later.<\/p>\n
On June 13, 2024, astronomers at the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder picked up a mysterious fast radio burst (FRB) that lasted for less than 30 nanoseconds. \u201cWe got all excited, thinking maybe we\u2019d discovered a new pulsar or some other object,\u201d Clancy James, a researcher at Curtin University, told New Scientist<\/a>. \u201cThis was an incredibly powerful radio pulse that vastly outshone everything else in the sky for a very short amount of time.\u201d<\/p>\n The scientists originally assumed\u00a0that the signal came from a distant object in the cosmos, but further analysis revealed that the long-dead Relay-2 was in fact the culprit behind the mysterious pulse, according to a paper<\/a> available on the preprint website arXiv.<\/p>\n