A powerful and mysterious blast of radio waves that astronomers believed was a fast radio burst (FRB) from far beyond the limits of the Milky Way has turned out to be an emission from a long-dead NASA satellite called Relay 2.
The now-discounted FRB or "pseudo-FRB" was initially detected by the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) in June 2024 as this radio telescope scanned the sky over the southern hemisphere. It was remarkable because this burst of radio waves lasted less than 30 nanoseconds, much shorter than most FRBs, and yet it was strong enough to drown out all other signals from the sky.
