CNN Science | Long-dead satellite emits strong radio signal, puzzling astronomers

(CNN) — Astronomers in Australia picked up a strange radio signal in June 2024 — one near our planet and so powerful that, for a moment, it outshined everything else in the sky. The ensuing search for its source has sparked new questions around the growing problem of debris in Earth’s orbit.

At first, though, the researchers thought they were observing something exotic.

“We got all excited, thinking we had discovered an unknown object in the vicinity of the Earth,” said Clancy James, an associate professor at Curtin University’s Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy in Western Australia.

The data James and his colleagues were looking at came from the ASKAP radio telescope, an array of 36 dish antennas in Wajarri Yamaji Country, each about three stories tall. Normally, the team would be searching the data for a type of signal called a “fast radio burst” — a flash of energy blasting forth from distant galaxies.  –read more–