A team of astronomers has detected a message from the dead. According to a new paper published on arXiv, a burst of transient radio waves that was detected in June 2024 was actually a signal from an inactive NASA satellite.
Though the occurrence of the signal is surprising, it isn’t that the dead satellite spontaneously restarted, turning on and resuming its transmissions to astronomers and observatories on Earth. Instead, the team says that this signal was probably due to an electrostatic discharge, or ESD, event — an accumulation of electricity that disperses with a radio-signaling spark.
“Our observation opens new possibilities for the remote sensing of ESD,” the team wrote in its paper, “and reveals a new source of false events for observations of astrophysical transients.”
