Amateur astronomer discovers mysterious signal coming from 24,900,000,000 km away
Amateur astronomers have received a transmission from a mysterious object over 24,900,000,000km away, and it has come from a rather unlikely yet familiar source.
Space is full of surprises - especially when you start to get further and further away - and these are often scientific marvels like a fascinating water reservoir or an asteroid that could give everyone on Earth over a billion dollars each.
Sometimes what you'll find is an unlikely connection though, and while most people's first instincts would point towards alien life, it's perhaps more mysterious if it's from something you thought was lost forever.
That's exactly what happened to Dutch amateur astronomers in Dwingeloo, as they received a transmission from NASA's long-departed Voyager 1 spacecraft after it was previously considered to be broken.
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Voyager 1 was initially sent out by NASA in 1977, and has since continued to travel through the Solar System until now, where it sits around 24.9 billion kilometers (or 15.5 billion miles) away from Earth.
Being nearly 50 years old its understandable for the spacecraft to have some technological issues, and in the past year it has had serious issues with it's transmission technology in particular.
It had been sending NASA nonsense via transmissions before eventually stopping altogether, but it had managed to switch from it's standard X-band transmitter to a radio-based one named the S-band, as reported by IFLScience.
NASA's Tony Greicius explains that "while the S-bad uses less power, Voyager 1 had not used it to communicate with Earth since 1981. It uses a different frequency than the X-band transmitters signal is significantly fainter."
X-band was able to be reactivated by NASA technicians though around mid November, and it now continued to collect data that will prove incredibly useful to the space agency.
It also proves strong enough to properly send transmissions back to Earth as discovered by the aforementioned amateur astronomers in the Netherlands, as they used a new antenna specifically designed to receive higher frequencies.
This is due to the Voyager 1's 8.4GHz signal that the Dwingeloo radio telescope was previously unable to properly reflect and receive, but thankfully this new implementation worked a treat.
What remains staggering though is that it took over 23 hours for the Voyager 1's signal to be received on Earth, showing truly how far away it's found itself over the course of half a century.
This remains a major achievement for amateur astrology too, as it is just one of a few non-NASA communications with Voyager 1 or similar spacecraft, and shows that you don't always need a telescope big enough to level a mountain to communicate with the outer reaches of the Solar System.