Last year, scientists detected a mysterious and powerful burst of radio waves that emerged from within our galaxy. Now, astronomers believe it was caused by a long-dead NASA satellite, but they don’t know how it happened.
Relay 2 exploded in 1964, but in 1967 the communications satellite went offline after two onboard transponders failed. Almost 60 years later, in June 2024, the satellite produced an unexpected signal, researchers said in a new preprint study, posted on the server Arxiv on June 13th, which has not yet been peer-reviewed.
“It was a very powerful radio pulse that was way more powerful than everything else in the sky for a very short time,” author Clancy James, an associate professor at the Institute of Radio Astronomical Astronomy, Curtin University in Australia, told the New Scientist.
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According to the print, the pulse continues in just 30 nanoseconds and none of the dead satellite’s systems match. Instead, James and his colleagues believe that the impact or power accumulation of micrometeorites caused a burst of radio waves.
Researchers detected strange pulses while scanning the sky for radio bursts in Australia’s Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP). A radio burst is a fierce explosion of radio waves that can release as much energy as the sun emits in three days in less than a second. According to a 2024 Nature article, it usually comes from distant galaxies, particularly rare, large galaxies.
However, the signal that James and his colleagues intercepted in June 2024 was not from a distant galaxy. It was born in the Milky Way. Askap couldn’t focus on it as the pulse began near Earth. Sometimes the phone’s camera can have a hard time focusing on nearby objects.
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“We were all excited to think we had discovered a new pulsar or other objects,” James told the New Scientist.
However, when researchers traced the origins of radio pulses, they determined that relay 2 was the only plausible source. As they ruled out the possibility that the pulses came from a satellite-mounted system, the team proposed two alternative events that could create such a burst.
First, the satellite may have been hit by micrometalites, researchers said in a preprint. The impact can create plasma clouds, increasing the conductivity of the spatial environment and create an electric field on the surface of the spacecraft. “The impact of micrometrics can also lead to direct radio frequency emissions,” the team wrote.
But a more likely scenario is that the radio burst originated from an electrostatic discharge event in relay 2, researchers said. Electrostatic discharge (ESD) occurs when there is sudden power between two nearby surfaces or materials on a spacecraft with different charges.
“As a very early spacecraft, the relay 2 could be built from materials […] “It can hold a larger charge and thus create more powerful ESD events, researchers write.
Both scenarios are possible, but it is very difficult to establish what was applied in this case. Karen Aprin, a professor of space science and technology at the University of Bristol in the UK, told a new scientist that he was not involved in the research. She said that it was because the signals produced by both seem very similar.
However, the study is an excellent launch pad for future investigations of electrostatic discharges from satellites, Aplin said. “In a world where there are many space debris and small, low-cost satellites with limited protection from electrostatic discharge, this radio detection could ultimately provide a new technique for assessing electrostatic discharge in space,” she said.
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