For those of you that were around back in 1974, you might remember the sending of the famous Arecibo Message. The Arecibo telescope is a huge radio telescope locate in Puerto Rico. In 1974, the telescope was remodeled, and to celebrate this, Astronomers decided to send a message into outer space! The message was written in binary code (1's and 0's) and sent into space using radio frequency waves. Astronomers used one frequency for the number 1, and another for the number 0. The message is shown in picture form above. It was aimed at a really big and bright cluster of 300,000 stars called M13. The thought was that if there is an alien planet around one of those stars, they would receive the radio message, be able to decode it (since binary is the simplest mathematical language that exists), and maybe send us one back! The bad news about all this is that it will take 25,000 years for the message to reach the cluster, and take another 25,000 years for their response to reach us. So maybe our very distant ancestors will receive a message from M13 one day!
Astro Trivia: Can you guess what the colored pictures in the image are supposed to represent? Leave your guesses in the comment section below! (And don't Google it, that's cheating!) I'll give you a hint, that stick figure in the middle is supposed to represent the human body shape…. Your turn!
