Last year, the NASA Relay 2 satellite let out a short but incredibly powerful blast of energy, despite being defunct since 1967.
NASA sent up the communications satellite in 1964, but it officially died on June 9, 1967, when the last of its two transponders failed to operate.
However, last summer, researchers were left shocked after discovering the dead Relay 2 satellite had emitted a very powerful pulse.
Cue the spooky music.
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The blast of energy was super powerful and close to Earth
Scientists are making remarkable discoveries about space all the time, like claiming to have found the ‘strongest evidence’ yet of potential life beyond Earth, or sending up a rover that completely changes our understanding of Mars.
Now, in a newly published paper, which is yet to be peer-reviewed, astronomers from Australia’s Curtin University have revealed they recorded a signal that outshone everything else in the night sky from a NASA satellite that was long dead.
The team said they initially thought the blast was coming from a pulsar or some as-yet-undiscovered cosmic object.
Although powerful, the signal was very short-lived, lasting just 30 nanoseconds.
“We got all excited, thinking maybe we’d discovered a new pulsar or some other object,” astronomer Clancy James told New Scientist.
“This was an incredibly powerful radio pulse that vastly outshone everything else in the sky for a very short amount of time.”
But after analyzing their data, they determined that the signal had come from somewhere close to Earth, within 20,000km (1,2427 miles).
They were eventually able to pinpoint where it came from and traced it to the NASA Relay 2 satellite
Although it was an answer of sorts, the discovery actually threw up more questions because the satellite had been out of action for almost 60 years.
So, what caused the NASA satellite to emit the energy blast?
As the NASA Relay 2 satellite is no longer functional, James and his team reckon the blast was most likely caused by an external force, such as a bit of space junk whacking into it, or an electrostatic discharge, which is caused by a build-up of electricity that is then released in a flash.
“We suggest that the burst originated from an electrostatic discharge event, or potentially a micrometeoroid impact, and consider that such events may be relatively common,” the astronomers said in the paper.
The team is hopeful that future space probes, as well as monitoring equipment, can be designed to better detect similar events.
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