From a recent article in The Australian:
AFTER you've spent more than 20 years hunting for an alien signal, you think you'd be celebrating if you noticed a mysterious pulse suddenly rising up on your computer readouts. A regular pulse, amid the random clatter of the cosmos, suggests that someone very smart at the other end is sending a message.
But when Ragbir Bhathal, an astrophysicist at the University of Western Sydney, who teaches the only university-based course on SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) in Australia, detected the suspicious signal on a clear night last December, he knew better than to crack open the special bottle of champagne he has tucked away for the history-making occasion.
Instead, he's spent the past few months meticulously investigating whether the unrecognised signature was caused by a glitch in his instrumentation, a rogue astrophysical phenomenon, or some unknown random noise.
Even if he picks up the signal again - he's been scouring the same co-ordinates of the night sky on an almost daily basis since - the scientific rule book dictates he'll need to get it peer-reviewed before he can take his announcement to the world. "And that is a lot of ifs," he concedes.
1 comments:
Back in 1992 there was a documentary, "SETI", from Channel Four International, but featuring a lot of Australian content, including an interview with an Australian Radio astronomer about his SETI near-miss in 1990. Apparently he detected a signal from the direction of a red-dwarf star in Ophiuchus some 26 light-years away. It lasted an hour, but faded before other radio telescopes could confirm it was extraterrestrial and not a spy-satellite or some other interference. The star was Gliese 673/ HD 157881, and it could have a habitable planet.
I wonder if that was the same direction that Dr. Bhathal's optical signal was spotted.
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