It’s not every day that a satellite from the Vietnam War era decides to scream back to life, but that’s what happened in June 2024. Relay-2, a NASA communications satellite launched in 1964 and officially declared dead in 1967, suddenly belched out a powerful burst of radio energy nearly 60 years after its demise.

It screamed out a brief but powerful radio pulse so intense that it outshone everything in the sky, even the usual loud space stuff like pulsars and quasars. Australian astronomers using the Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder, or ASKAP, were excited at first, thinking they’d made a startling discovery. It is, in a sense. Just not something as marvelous as they probably thought at first. Turns out, the sound was coming from an unlikely place, NASA’s long-dead Relay-2.

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Astronomer Clancy James and his team at Curtin University traced the signal to the derelict satellite, which had been tumbling in low Earth orbit for several decades. Their findings, published in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, suggest that the pulse may have been the result of either a collision with space junk (which there is a lot of up there) or a long-delayed electrostatic discharge.

Hey, did you know that satellites can build up static electricity over decades and then suddenly let it rip like one big electromagnetic cosmic burp? It’s true. That might not be what happened here; it could have been smacked with a space object. No one knows yet.

Whatever the cause, it’s certainly weird, and making researchers wonder if there are any other supposedly “dead” satellites waiting to release an enormous electromagnetic burst?

Again, there are way, way too many satellites, dead or otherwise, polluting Earth’s orbit. Any number of them could emit a scream any day now, especially now that we know that’s a possibility. It’s not like we can induce it from here, so all folks at the planet’s space research stations can do is keep their ears open for a zombie satellite to release one final belch.