What happens when a relic of the early Space Age unexpectedly outshines the cosmos, even for a fleeting instant? In June 2024 ...

Radio telescopes saw a strange burst of unknown energy in June 2024. Now we know it was from Relay 2, an early ...

A new observatory in Chile has produced a stunningly detailed image of a nebula resembling cotton candy, using the largest ...

And astronomers have a brand-new, superpowerful eye with which to see the changing cosmos: the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in ...

A NASA satellite that’s been orbiting as space junk since 1967, Relay 2, emitted an unexpected, powerful radio burst that ...

Around midday on June 13 last year, my colleagues and I were scanning the skies when we thought we had discovered a strange ...

A newly discovered radio halo, 10 billion light-years away, reveals that galaxy clusters in the early universe were already steeped in high-energy particles. The finding hints at ancient black hole ...

LOFAR detects a faint radio 'mini-halo' from 3.8 billion years ago, revealing how galaxy clusters evolved in the early ...

After taking a closer look, however, the team realized that the only viable source for the burst was NASA’s dead Relay 2, a ...