Category: 7. Science

These pulses are gradually tearing the African continent apart and forming a new ocean basin, according to a study led by University of Southampton researchers.

The Afar region is a rare place on Earth where three tectonic rifts converge: the Main Ethiopian Rift, the Red Sea Rift, and the Gulf of Aden Rift.

Geologists have long suspected that a hot upwelling of mantle, sometimes referred to as a plume, lies beneath the region, helping to drive the extension of the crust and the birth of a future ocean basin.

But until now, little was known about the structure of this upwelling, or how it behaves beneath rifting plates.

“We found that the mantle beneath Afar is not uniform or stationary — it pulses, and these pulses carry distinct chemical signatures,” said Dr. Emma Watts, who conducted the research at the University of Southampton and is now based at Swansea University.

“These ascending pulses of partially molten mantle are channelled by the rifting plates above.”

“That’s important for how we think about the interaction between Earth’s interior and its surface.”

Dr. Watts and colleagues collected more than 130 volcanic rock samples from across the Afar region and the Main Ethiopian Rift.

They used these, plus existing data and advanced statistical modeling, to investigate the structure of the crust and mantle, as well as the melts that it contains.

Their results show that underneath the Afar region is a single, asymmetric plume, with distinct chemical bands that repeat across the rift system, like geological barcodes.

These patterns vary in spacing depending on the tectonic conditions in each rift arm.

“The chemical striping suggests the plume is pulsing, like a heartbeat,” said University of Southampton’s Professor Tom Gernon.

“These pulses appear to behave differently depending on the thickness of the plate, and how fast it’s pulling apart.”

“In faster-spreading rifts like the Red Sea, the pulses travel more efficiently and regularly like a pulse through a narrow artery.”

The findings show that the mantle plume beneath the Afar region is not static, but dynamic and responsive to the tectonic plate above it.

“We have found that the evolution of deep mantle upwellings is intimately tied to the motion of the plates above,” said Dr. Derek Keir, a researcher at the University of Southampton and the University of Florence.

“This has profound implications for how we interpret surface volcanism, earthquake activity, and the process of continental breakup.”

“The work shows that deep mantle upwellings can flow beneath the base of tectonic plates and help to focus volcanic activity to where the tectonic plate is thinnest.”

“Follow on research includes understanding how and at what rate mantle flow occurs beneath plates.”

“Working with researchers with different expertise across institutions, as we did for this project, is essential to unravelling the processes that happen under Earth’s surface and relate it to recent volcanism,” Dr. Watts said.

“Without using a variety of techniques, it is hard to see the full picture, like putting a puzzle together when you don’t have all the pieces.”

The study was published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

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E.J. Watts et al. Mantle upwelling at Afar triple junction shaped by overriding plate dynamics. Nat. Geosci, published online June 25, 2025; doi: 10.1038/s41561-025-01717-0

FireSat is capable of multispectral imaging across the visible, near-infrared, short-, mid- and long-wave infrared bands simultaneously. The firm said the broad array of IR data is essential for detecting wildfires in their early stages, monitoring fire dynamics and tracking other thermal anomalies. 

While this technology demonstration has proven successful, a further 50 or so satellites will ultimately need to be in orbit to complete the constellation. It will operate in low-Earth orbit with an observation swath width of 1,500km and a nadir ground sample distance of 50m.

The instrument’s resolution, sensitivity and large dynamic range enable it to detect small cool fires 5×5 metres while also imaging without saturation for hot, intense fires.

Google, which has provided $13m (£9.5m) to the initiative led by Earth Fire Alliance, said it will be able to “detect and track wildfires the size of a classroom within 20 minutes”. While each point on Earth will be observed every 20 minutes, key wildfire-prone regions will benefit from more frequent observations. 

Muon Space is planning to launch the first block of three additional FireSat satellites in 2026, followed by a series of further launches that should see the constellation completed by 2030.

In recent years, scientists have been exploring the use of renewable polymers derived from natural sources. Materials such as vegetable cellulose, bacterial cellulose, chitosan, and starch offer attractive properties for biomedical applications, especially in controlled drug release systems and regenerative medicine. However, despite their potential, many of these polymers still face significant challenges in reaching commercialization.

The study conducted by Lopes et al. points out that despite advances, only a few natural polymers have become available on the market. The research emphasizes the importance of chemical modification and preparation strategies to improve the properties of these materials for clinical applications consequently.

An interesting finding of the study is that, despite the promising properties of these renewable polymers, the path from the bench to the market remains challenging. This is due to factors such as the need to ensure the safety, efficacy, and economic viability of these materials before their widespread adoption.

As such, this study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the properties and potential of renewable polymers for biomedical applications, highlighting the routes from the laboratory to the market and the prospects for future developments. Addressing these aspects is hoped to contribute to the advancement and applicability of these sustainable materials in biomedical practice.

The Earth will reach its farthest point from the sun on Thursday, July 3, according to Timeanddate.com

This event, known as aphelion, happens once per year typically around two weeks after the summer solstice in June. Although the Earth’s distance from the Sun does not affect the seasons, aphelion does influence the length of summer in the Northern Hemisphere.

Because Earth moves in an elliptical orbit around the sun, being further away means it travels slower along its orbit. This increases the time it takes to get from the solstice, the beginning of summer, to the equinox, the end of summer, effectively making the season longer in the Northern Hemisphere, according to Timeanddate.com.

On Thursday, Earth will be over 94.5 million miles away from the sun. On average the planet sits at 93 million miles away, according to Earthsky.com.

Earlier this year, astronomers alerted the world to a startling possibility: based on initial calculations, it appeared that a recently discovered asteroid known as 2024 YR4 had a not-zero chance of colliding with Earth in 2032. At 174–220 feet wide, the space rock has the potential to destroy a sizable city in less than a decade’s time. In this case, however, “not-zero” never amounted to anything higher than a three percent probability. And after gathering additional information from an array of terrestrial observatories as well as the James Webb Space Telescope, experts concluded in March that 2024 YR4 didn’t pose any direct threat to the planet.

But just because Earth was spared doesn’t mean our moon is safe. Based on the most recent calculations, the chance that the asteroid has a 2032 date with the lunar surface is higher than it ever was for us.

“The probability that asteroid 2024 YR4 will strike the Moon on 22 December 2032 is now approximately 4 percent, and this probability was still slowly rising as the asteroid faded out of view,” the European Space Agency said in its most recent update.

Okay, so it’s not that much more likely than 2024 YR4’s highest probability for Earth. But a 96-percent likelihood of missing the moon leaves room for the space rock to defy the odds. Astronomers will now need to wait until its orbit sends it around the sun in mid-2028 to begin conducting further observations.

So what happens if 2024 YR4 really does collide with the moon? That’s a great question—one that even the experts can’t answer at the moment.

“No one knows what the exact effects would be,” admitted ESA Planetary Defense Office director Richard Moissl. “It is a very rare event for an asteroid this large to impact the Moon—and it is rarer still that we know about it in advance.”

Moissl added the collision “would certainly leave a new crater on the surface,” but it’s not currently possible to accurately predict how much material would eject into space, and whether Earth’s gravitational pull would catch any of it. That said, there isn’t a major worry that an asteroid of 2024 YR’s size would result in lunar armageddon. Moissl also explained that while the impact would likely be visible from Earth, astronomers remain “excited by the prospect of observing and analyzing it.”

If you’re still uneasy about errant asteroids hurtling towards us, take comfort in knowing that international space agencies are working to improve our early detection capabilities and plan for worst-case scenarios. The ESA, for example, is currently planning to launch its Near-Earth Object Mission in the Infrared (NEOMIR) satellite in the early 2030s. NEOMIR is designed to position itself at the first Sun-Earth Lagrange Point, one of five locations where the planet’s gravitational forces and the satellite’s orbit interact to allow for a stable observation point. Once there, the array will be able to scan for unknown asteroids larger than 197-feet-wide that are potentially en route to Earth. This will provide governments and agencies much more time to identify, analyze, and plan for space emergencies.

“NEOMIR would have detected asteroid 2024 YR4 about a month earlier than ground-based telescopes did,” Moissl explained. “This would have given astronomers more time to study the asteroid’s trajectory and allowed them to much sooner rule out any chance of Earth impact in 2032.”

Utah State University physicist Jenny Whiteley’s Northern Utah home has recently given her and her family occasional glimpses of colorful auroras in the night sky.

“We’ve seen vibrant greens and purples, with moving, vertical white shafts of light,” says Whiteley, a doctoral student in USU’s Department of Physics. “It was fascinating to see the electrons trace out magnetic field lines above the Earth, which are always there but only visible under certain — and in our location — rare conditions.”

The ability to explain physical phenomena following mathematical logic is what attracts Whiteley to the study of physics.

“It’s amazing to me that mathematical expressions can be constructed to successfully replicate the physical behavior we see around us,” she says.

Whiteley, who is one of five USU graduate students selected this time last year for a 2024-2025 Utah NASA Space Grant Consortium Fellowship Award, is studying radiation-induced conductivity in the Materials Physics Group led by USU physics professor J.R. Dennison.

The lab’s team members perform ground-based testing of electrical charging and electron transport properties of both conducting and insulating materials, emphasizing studies of electron emission, conductivity, luminescence and electrostatic discharge.

The lab’s research is supported by NASA, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and private aerospace companies.

“Among the topics studied in Dr. Dennison’s lab is how various materials behave in response to harsh conditions, such as space,” Whiteley says.

The space community, she notes, is highly focused on hazards posed to spacecraft and aircraft by static electricity, radiation and extreme temperatures.

Whiteley, who earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from USU, in 2021 and 2023, respectively, has spent much of the past year analyzing data from Idaho State University’s Idaho Accelerator Center (IAC) in Pocatello collected by previous group members.

“Dr. Dennison and his students have studied how to measure conductivity in highly insulating materials, such as polymers used in spacecraft,” she says.

Whiteley is preparing to conduct tests similar to those at the IAC, using much smaller and more compact instrumentation, here at Utah State.

“The USU Materials Physics Group now has instrumentation that can test radiation-induced conductivity in materials accurately and efficiently at a lower cost than the previously used method,” she says.

“Working with the new instrumentation will be fun,” Whiteley says. “I am looking forward to the hands-on aspects of this work, where we’ll set up experiments and determine how to collect data.”

The materials she and group members are testing, she points out, are insulators.

“By definition, they don’t conduct,” Whiteley says. “But because of the atomic level interaction between the radiation and the material, we sometimes get a surprise: conductivity. It is important to quantify this behavior to those choosing materials because of specific insulating properties so they aren’t caught unawares once ambient conditions change.”

The stakes are high, she says, as NASA and other space agencies plan for increasingly longer space missions. Spacecraft must endure grueling conditions.

Dennison says Whiteley, who was one of USU’s 2020 Goldwater Scholars, is among the most inquisitive scholars he’s ever met.

“Jenny is an ideal candidate to pursue a challenging research endeavor, because she’s naturally curious and never gives up,” he says. “She asks lots of questions, reads and listens to other scholars. She genuinely wants to understand difficult concepts and isn’t afraid of failure.”

That last quality, Dennison says, makes Whiteley an effective teacher as well as a researcher. Whiteley says one of the best parts of teaching is helping others move beyond bewilderment to confident comprehension.

“Teaching has given me the opportunity to internalize concepts at a much deeper level than what I understood when I took the class myself,” she says. “I really enjoy helping others who are overwhelmed by the physics concepts or by the volume of material hurled at them. It’s quite fun to help a student go from ‘I’m so confused” to ‘maybe I’ve got this.’”

World Asteroid Day started with a real bang.

On June 30, 1908, an asteroid about 65 meters wide collided with Earth’s atmosphere and exploded several miles above Siberia; the force of the blast flattened and burned millions of trees over an area of more than 2,000 square kilometers. Today, the anniversary of the Tunguska blast has become World Asteroid Day: a science holiday co-founded by a rock music legend and an Apollo astronaut.

In 2015, Apollo 9 lunar module pilot Rusty Schweickart helped launch World Asteroid Day with astrophysicist and Queen guitarist Brian May. The United Nations officially recognized the event a year later in 2016. Earlier this month, Arizona senator Mark Kelly – also a former astronaut – introduced a Senate resolution that, if passed, would officially recognize June 30 as World Asteroid Day in the U.S.

I spoke with Kevin Schindler, resident historian at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, about the origins of World Asteroid Day, the history of planetary defense, and what asteroids can reveal about the history of our Solar System.

Discovering the Danger from Outer Space

Around 200 years ago, in the 1830s, geologists began to study fossils and figure out that several mass extinctions had wiped out whole ecosystems of species on Earth in the distant past.

“In recent decades, they realized that those weren’t necessarily caused by something on Earth, but by something impacting from space – like the Cretaceous Tertiary boundary,” says Schindler.

In the 1960s, geologist Walter Alvarez discovered a thin layer of black clay in rocks around the world. Below the black line, the rocks were rich in fossils; above it, they were nearly barren. The same layer of black clay showed up all around in the world: in rock outcroppings in Italy and New Zealand, and in samples from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. And it clearly marked a deadly before-and-after moment in Earth’s history – one that happened around 66 million years ago.

Alvarez suspected that the black clay was something alien; it contained bizarrely large amounts of an element called iridium, which is vanishingly rare here on Earth but more common in asteroids. He began to realize that an asteroid or comet may have slammed into our planet 66 million years ago, kicking off a mass extinction and scattering iridium-rich black dust over the planet like a burial shroud.

The pieces came together in 1978 when geophysicists Glen Penfield and Antonio Camargo discovered the outline of a crater hundreds of kilometers wide at the edge of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Its center lies at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Penfield and Camargo named the crater for one of the communities that now lies within its boundaries: Chicxulub Pueblo.

Other craters – smaller but still impressive – also make it obvious that our planet has had more than a few run-ins with meteors during its long history.

“And while there’s not as much debris floating around in our Solar System as when it was newly-formed, there’s still stuff out there,” says Schindler. “And it’s inevitable that at some point that stuff will come back and get us again.”

From Deep Impact to DART

So we’ve known almost 60 years that asteroids and comets could threaten life on Earth.

“In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a search to look for bodies that specifically could impact Earth,” says Schindler. “Phase one of all this started with, ‘okay, let’s look for these bodies that could hit us,’ and then a couple decades later is when we got to phase two, ‘what can we do about it if we do find these things?’”

Strangely enough, it was a pair of high-budget, low-scientific-accuracy Hollywood blockbusters that really brought planetary defense to public attention, according to Schindler. The summer of 1998 featured not just one but two movies about humanity trying to save itself from extinction by blowing up an incoming chunk of space rock. In Armageddon, a wildly-improbable effort by a team of offshore drillers saves Earth from an asteroid impact; in Deep Impact, a similarly-improbable effort fails to save Earth from a comet (so the summer ends in a cinematic tie).

“The good thing about those movies is that, even though they’re not scientifically accurate in every way, they certainly built awareness enough to where lawmakers said, you know, we should put some money aside to study this stuff more,” says Schindler. “Hollywood, in some ways, has helped the cause to learn more.”

And, as science fiction often does, Deep Impact and Armageddon provided thought experiments (albeit not super-accurate ones, to put it mildly) for the ideas that would eventually become actual efforts at planetary defense. According to Schindler, theoretical ideas about whether we could destroy an incoming meteor eventually shifted to ideas about just nudging the deadly object off-course.

“This is just something that’s really been developed in the last decade or so and – I wouldn’t say culminated, but really became well-known with the mission that went up to deflect the moon of an asteroid to see if it was possible,” says Schindler.

That mission was NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, in which an intrepid little spacecraft flew 7 million miles to crash into the asteroid Dimorphos and knock it off-course. Dimorphos is actually a mini-moon that orbits another, larger asteroid called Didymos. Astronomers at Lowell carefully measured Dimorphos’s orbital path around its parent asteroid before and after the impact – and they saw evidence that DART had succeeded in knocking Dimorphos into a different orbit.

It’s a long, long way from deflecting one tiny asteroid moonlet onto a different path around its parent asteroid to deflecting something the size of the Chicxulub impactor – or even Tunguska – as it’s barreling toward Earth. But the consensus seems to be that DART was a good start.

“The biggest thing, I think, was that it is possible. This was a very controlled initial step,” says Schindler. “This was certainly promising enough that we should keep doing these tests in different sizes of body and different compositions, because depending on what it’s made of, a body might react differently to something impacting it.”

Fossils of the Early Solar System

Meanwhile, Schindler and World Asteroid Day also want the public to know that asteroids are more than potential threats: they’re an orbiting treasure trove of information about the history of our Solar System and even the origins of life.

Most asteroids are chunks of rock that coalesced early in our Solar System’s history but never grew massive enough to become planets; they’re like the seeds of planets that might have been. Others are the debris left behind by collisions between objects in those chaotic early days of the Solar System, when planets were forming and gas giants migrated, scattering lesser objects in their wake.

“They tell us what the early composition was and what a chaotic time it was in the early part of our Solar System,” says Schindler.

Those clues are written not just in the chemical and physical makeup of asteroids, but in their orbital paths around the Sun. By studying and modelling how those paths have changed over the years, scientists can reconstruct how asteroids and planets may have interacted. The orbits of modern asteroids are like the “footprints” of planet formation, migrating gas giants, and long-ago collisions.

Today, NASA’s Lucy mission is exploring the asteroid belt, getting up close and personal with several of these objects. Meanwhile, NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX mission is on its way to study the asteroid Apophis, which will pass close (but not too close!) to Earth in 2029.

“And now we are studying planetary systems around other stars. Better understanding our Solar System, we can now look at others and see how typical we are,” says Schindler. “You don’t know that without knowing your own Solar System pretty well, so it really has helped us to learn about, sort of, our heritage, I guess.”

World Asteroid Day

World Asteroid Day aims to tie all of those things together, promoting awareness of planetary defense but also of the immense scientific value – and maybe monetary value, eventually – of asteroids.

At Lowell Observatory, that awareness is hard to escape; the observatory stands just an hour’s drive from Meteor Crater – which is exactly what the name suggests, a 213-meter-deep, 1200-meter-wide crater where an object about the size of a Boeing 747 slammed into the desert floor around 50,000 years ago.

“The proximity of Lowell Observatory, where we’re studying bodies in space, and Meteor crater, where we’ve seen the result of one of those bodies hitting Earth – how convenient is that? We’re looking at both ends of it, from when it’s still up in space to the final product if something like this hits.”

When humans burst into laughter together, moods lift almost automatically. New research shows that a similar boost happens in our closest cousins.

An international team led by Indiana University scientists has discovered that bonobos become more upbeat after hearing the giggles of their companions. This finding pushes the evolutionary history of positive emotions back millions of years.

Laughter changed ape choices

To explore laughter’s influence, the researchers designed a cognitive-bias test often used in animal psychology to gauge optimism or pessimism.

First, they trained bonobos at the Ape Initiative in Des Moines, Iowa, to recognize two kinds of boxes: black ones that always contained a delicious snack and white ones that were always empty.

Once the apes consistently chose black and ignored white, the experimenters introduced a third, ambiguous gray box. They then played one of two sounds: recorded bonobo laughter or a neutral control noise.

“We know that other apes, like chimpanzees, have contagious laughter during play,” said lead author Sasha Winkler, a primatologist at Duke University. “We were wondering if that behavior could be explained by positive emotions produced from the sound itself.”

If the bonobos felt a surge of good feeling after hearing laughter, the team expected them to treat the uncertain gray box as if it were the rewarding black one.

That is exactly what happened. “Think of it like the rose-colored glasses effect,” Winkler said. “The bonobos were much more likely to approach the gray boxes after hearing laughter, treating them like the rewarded boxes, and indicating a more optimistic expectation of finding a treat.”

Tracing optimism to our ancestors

This study is the first experimental proof that great-ape laughter can shift mood and cognition the way human laughter does.

“The tendency to behave more optimistically after hearing laughter suggests that the sound alone induced a positive emotional state in bonobos,” said senior author Erica Cartmill, the director of Indiana University’s Cognitive Science Program.

“This is the first study of which we’re aware to measure a positive affect shift in nonhuman primates from a brief experimental intervention.”

Great apes –  bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans – all emit play calls that acoustically resemble human chuckles. Earlier work tied those sounds to a common evolutionary origin. The new findings add a cognitive twist.

“Our results suggest that laughter in other apes shares not only phylogenetic and behavioral similarities with human laughter but also perhaps some of the same cognitive-emotional underpinnings,” Winkler noted.

“This emotional contagion appears to have been present in the primate lineage long before the evolution of language.”

Laughter, empathy, and apes

Emotional contagion is often described as a foundational element of empathy – the capacity to share another’s feelings. As Winkler put it, “studies like ours can help to untangle the evolutionary building blocks of empathy, communication, and cooperation in humans.”

By revealing that a simple vocal cue can brighten outlooks in bonobos, the research suggests that the mechanisms linking social sound to positive mood were already in place in a common ancestor millions of years ago.

Cartmill added that the work answers a long-standing bias in emotion research. “Our emotions influence many aspects of cognition, including memory, attention, and decision-making, but research has historically focused on negative emotions with clear behavioral correlates, like fear and aggression.”

“We wanted to better understand the relationship between positive affect and cognition in our closest living relatives.”

Kanzi and the future of empathy

The experiments involved four bonobos, including the celebrated language-using ape Kanzi, who recently passed away.

“I feel incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Kanzi while he was still alive,” Winkler said.

“We hope this brings greater public awareness of the remarkable similarities between us and bonobos, who are an endangered species. We have so much to learn from these incredible animals.”

Future studies will test whether laughter exerts similar cognitive effects in chimpanzees and other primates. They will also explore how social context – for example, hearing laughs from friends versus strangers – modulates optimism.

For now, the discovery that bonobo giggles brighten expectations highlights a shared emotional heritage and hints that a simple laugh has been boosting group spirits since long before humans walked the Earth.

The study is published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

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At first, the team at Curtin University believed they had discovered something extraordinary — perhaps a new type of astronomical object or an ultra-rare fast radio burst (FRB) from within our galaxy.

“We were really excited,” Dr. Clancy James, associate professor at Curtin’s Institute of Radio Astronomy, told CNN. “It looked like we had found an unknown object near Earth.”
The data came from the ASKAP telescope, an advanced array of 36 large antennas spread across the Wajarri Yamaji Country in Western Australia. This setup is usually used to detect FRBs — intense, millisecond-long bursts of radio energy from distant galaxies, potentially caused by exotic phenomena like magnetars, the ultra-magnetic remains of dead stars.

These bursts are not only puzzling but also powerful tools for mapping the “missing” matter in the universe. But this particular signal wasn’t behaving like a normal FRB.

Unlike typical FRBs that originate billions of light-years away, this burst appeared to be shockingly close — just 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles) from Earth. When the team zoomed into the data, the image became blurry — a telltale sign the source was much closer than expected.After sifting through satellite databases, the astronomers matched the source to Relay 2, a long-defunct U.S. communications satellite launched in 1964. Relay 2 had been orbiting silently since its instruments failed in 1967.But this sparked an even more bizarre question: Could a dead satellite suddenly burst back to life?

A Flash from the Past
The leading theory is an electrostatic discharge — a burst of energy caused by a buildup of electric charge on the satellite’s surface, similar to the shock you get from touching a doorknob after walking on carpet. When the charge releases, it can emit a sharp flash of radio energy.

While these discharges are common and often harmless, the intensity and brevity of this one — just 30 nanoseconds long — was unprecedented. In fact, it was 2,000 to 3,000 times brighter than any other signal the ASKAP instrument typically detects.

Another possibility, though less likely, is that a micrometeorite no larger than a grain of sand slammed into Relay 2 at extreme speed, causing a burst of plasma and radio waves. However, the team estimates there’s only about a 1% chance that was the cause.

Why This Matters
Although this turned out to be a human-made source, the discovery underscores a major challenge in space research: the interference of space junk with astronomical observations. With over 22,000 satellites launched since the dawn of the space age — and thousands no longer functional — Earth’s orbit is becoming a crowded and unpredictable place.

Signals like the one from Relay 2 could easily be mistaken for cosmic phenomena, especially as ground-based observatories like ASKAP and upcoming arrays such as SKA-Low (Square Kilometre Array) continue to scan the skies for fast, faint signals.

While this unexpected “zombie signal” turned out to be from a defunct satellite, it opens up new possibilities for using radio telescopes to monitor aging spacecraft for signs of unusual activity.