by Astronomers in Australia took a strange radio signal on a one near our planet in mid-June and so powerful that it showered everything else in the sky for one moment. The following search for his source has triggered new questions about the growing problem of debris in the orbit.
At first, however, the researchers thought that they were watching something exotic.
“We were all excited and thought that we had discovered an unknown object near the earth,” said Clancy James, Associate Professor at the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy at Curtin University in Western Australia.
The data that James and his colleagues looked at came from the ASKAP radio telescope, a number of 36 coincidence in Wajarri Yamaji Country, each of which is high over three floors. Usually the team would search the data for a kind of signal called “fast radio burst” – an energy that protrudes from remote galaxies.
“These are incredibly strong explosions on the radio (waves) that take about a millisecond,” said James. “We don’t know what to do and we are trying to find out because they really challenge the known physics – they are so smart. We also try to use them to examine the distribution of matter in the universe.”
According to James, astronomers believe that these outbreaks come from Magnetars. These objects are very dense remains dead stars with strong magnetic fields. “Magnare are completely crazy,” said James. “They are the most extreme things you can get into the universe before something turns into a black hole.”
But the signal seemed to get very close to the earth – so close that it could not be a astronomical object. “We were able to find out that it was removed from about 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles). And we have a pretty accurate match for this old satellite called Relay 2 – there are databases in which you can look up to train where a given satellite should be, and there were no other satellites near James.
“We were all disappointed about it, but we thought:” Keep for a second. What did that actually produce? “
A massive short circuit
NASA started in 1964 Relay 2, an experimental communication satellite, in the orbit. It was an updated version of relay 1, which was lifted two years earlier and was used to pass on signals between the USA and Europe and to broadcast the Olympics of the Summer Olympics from 1964 in Tokyo.
Only three years later, when their mission was completed and both main instruments were outside of the order, Relay 2 had already turned into space waste. Since then it has circled our planet aimlessly until James and his colleagues have associated it with the strange signal that they discovered on June 13th.
But could a dead satellite suddenly bring to life again after decades of silence?
In order to try to answer this question, the astronomers wrote a paper about their analysis, which should publish on Monday in the magazine The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
They realized that the source of the signal was not a distant galactic anomaly, but something nearby when they saw that the image created by the telescope – a graphic representation of the data – was blurred.
The blurry image is shown above, in which the astronomers scratched their heads with the signal in the middle. – Marcin Glowacki
“(T) He, the reason that we got this blurred picture, was that (the source) was in the near field of the antenna – within a few tens of thousands of kilometers,” said James. “If you have a source that is close to the antenna, she arrives on the outer antennas a little later and creates a curved wave front, in contrast to a flat when it is really far away.”
This non -agreement in the data between the different antennas caused blurring. To remove them, the researchers removed the signal that came from the outer antennas in order to prefer only the inner part of the telescope, which is spread over around 2.3 square miles in Australian Australians.
“When we discovered it for the first time, it looked pretty weak. But when we entered it, it got brighter and brighter. The entire signal is about 30 nanoseconds or 30 billion of one second, but the main part is only three nanoseconds, and that is actually the limit that our instrument can see,” said James. “The signal was about 2,000 or 3,000 times brighter than all other radio data that our (instrument) captures – it was by far the brightest thing in the sky, a factor of thousands.”
The researchers have two ideas, which could have caused such a strong spark. The main culprit was probably a structure of static electricity on the metal skin of the satellite, which was suddenly released, said James.
“They start building electrons on the surface of the spacecraft. The spaceship begins to charge electrons because of the structure. And it is always charged until enough charges are raised that it is briefly a component of the spacecraft group, and they receive a sudden spark. “It is exactly the same as if you rub your feet on the carpet and then steer your friend with her finger.”
A less likely cause is the influence of a micrometeorite, a space rock that is not greater than 1 millimeter (0.039 inches) size: “A micrometeorite that has a spaceship (while a spaceship) works at 20 kilometers per second or higher, basically converts the (resulting) debris into a plasma – an incredibly hot gas,” said James. “And this plasma can spend a short outbreak of radio waves.”
However, the strict circumstances would have to come into play for these micrometeorite interaction, which indicates that, according to research, there was a less chance that this was the cause. “We know that (electrostatic) discharges can actually be widespread,” said James. “As far as people are concerned, they are not dangerous at all. However, they can absolutely damage a spaceship.”
NASA started in 1964 The Satellite Relay 2. Three years later, the mission of relay 2 was over. – NASA
A risk of confusion
Since these discharges are difficult to monitor, James believes that the radio signal event shows that soil-based radio observations could show “strange things with satellites”-and that researchers could use a much cheaper, easier easier device to search for similar events instead of the extensive telescope that they used. He also speculated that the materials from which it was manufactured more susceptible to a list of static load than modern satellites that were designed with this problem because Relay 2 was an early satellite.
The realization that satellites can impair galactic observations is also a challenge and complements the list of threats that emerge through space waste. Since the dawn of space age, almost 22,000 satellites have reached circulation, and a little more than half have been working. Over the decades, dead satellites have collided hundreds of times, creating a thick field of ruins and spawning millions of tiny fragments, which circle at a speed of up to 18,000 miles per hour.
“We are basically trying to see nanosecond storms from the universe, and if satellites can also produce this, we have to be really careful,” said James, referring to the possibility of confusing satellite storms with astronomical objects. “If more and more satellites are increasing, this type of experiment will make it difficult.”
According to James Cordes, James and the analysis of this event of his team, George Feldstein, professor of astronomy, who was not involved in the study, is “comprehensive and reasonable”. “In view of the fact that the phenomenon of electrostatic unloading has been known for a long time,” he wrote in an e -mail to CNN, “I think your interpretation is probably right. I am not sure whether the micrometeoroid idea, which is absorbed as an alternative to the paper.
Ralph Spencer, emeritus professor of radio astronomy at the University of Manchester in Great Britain, which was also not involved in the work, agrees that the proposed mechanism is feasible, and finds that sparks of GPS satellites have already been determined.
The study shows how astronomers have to pay attention to the fact that radio burdens are not pointed out with astrophysical sources with electrostatic discharges or micrometeoroid bursts, both cordes and Spencer.
“The results show that such tight impulses from the room are more common than previously assumed, and that careful analysis is necessary to show that the radiation of stars and other astronomical objects is more than humans caused by humans near the earth,” added Spencer in an email.
“New experiments in development, such as the square kilometer array-rod frequency array (SKA-Low), which is built in Australia, can shed light on this new effect.”
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