Saturday, 19. April 2008
Topic: Space - on April 19, 2008 at 1:14:00 PM CEST
First signals from extraterrestrial civilizations arrived on Earth 40 years ago
The story has rather a commonplace beginning. British radio astronomer Antony Hewish – who was already well-known in the 1960s – asked his postgraduate Jocelyn Bell to make her own telescope to explore the sky and search for new quasars. With the help of her colleagues she coiled kilometers of wire around hundreds of wooden poles. Thus, she created a very sensitive aerial that subsequently began to receive strange signals on a regular basis.
At first Jocelyn thought that this was a form of interference from a military or commercial station located nearby. Afterwards, she started checking engineering data of her wire entanglements. In the end Jocelyn concluded that signals were of space origin.
Her advisor and she were even frightened at first when they thought about green aliens who sent them a coded message from the depth of space. For half a year they kept Bell’s discovery dark until they published a joint report on pulsatile signals in Nature magazine in 1968.
... Comment
