Voyage to the Bottom of the Geek

Paging Mr. Verne...Paging Mr. Wells...Paging Mr. Spock....

It's all but undoubtedly not what it could be, but even the idea is just cool.

Astronomers think that a signal picked up by a radio telescope last year shows the highest probability yet that ET's family may have returned his call.

In February 2003, scientists involved in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) pointed the huge radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, at about 200 sections of the sky.

Unexplained radio signals had been detected twice by the same telescope in these areas and scientists were trying to confirm the findings.

It may sound fanciful, but a report in the journal NewScientist reveals how the team has now finished analysing the data, and all the signals seem to have disappeared - except for one which has got stronger. Detected on three separate occasions, the signal is "an enigma", say researchers.

One of the interesting things about the signal is that it's frequency is that of a fundamental property of the universe related to the absorption and release of energy by hydrogen atoms. Many have speculated that an intelligent race wishing to announce its presence might well transmit on such a frequency under the assumption than any civilization technologically advanced enough to be interested would recognize the significance.

While the idea of a signal from space is exciting, the more pedestrian (and more likely) explanation would be some sort of artifact of the equipment, that is, something the telescope itself was generating, or some Earth-based interference. While hardly unusual, that would be disappointing.

There is, however, a third possibility between artifact and alien: The signal could be generated by some previously-unknown astronomical phenomenon. While not as cool as ET, that would still be pretty cool.

In fact, it's happened before: In 1967, astronomers at the University of Cambridge in the UK discovered a signal of regular pulses coming from one particular part of the sky - so regular, in fact, it tempted some to think it had to be artificial. Unfortunately for the scifi set, within a month or two the team discovered similar regularly-pulsing signals (albeit each at a different rate) from three other parts of the sky. The idea that four different alien civilizations in different parts of the galaxy were all trying to reach us with the same sort of signal at the same time was too much to credit.

When the team announced their findings in late January, 1968, Fred Hoyle (who is now generally remembered only as the developer of the discredited "steady state" hypothesis of cosmology but who was in fact a brilliant astronomer) said it could be the remnants of a supernova. Shortly thereafter, another astronomer named Thomas Gold calculated that a spinning neutron star could produce the effects seen.

The team had discovered pulsars. It was worth a shared 1974 Nobel Prize in physics.

Maybe there's another one in the works here.

Footnote: The Nobel went to the team's director, Tony Hewish. It was a graduate student named S. Joycelyn Bell (now Burnell) who maintained the equipment, did the observations, collected and analyzed all the data, and thought the signal to be a star - while Hewish at first was prepared to write it off as terrestrial interference. That is, she made the discovery and did all the heavy lifting. But because she was a graduate student, she did not share in the prize. Which is apparently SOP. And which I think stinks.