Contacting Aliens: The Arecibo Message

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!

SETI: The Search For Aliens!

 

  

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a collaboration of people and activities whose goal is to search for and contact extra-terrestrial (ET) life. When you hear SETI, most people think of the Allen Telescope Array, a collections of 42 twenty foot wide radio dishes that are constantly searching for radio signals emitted by ET (pictured above). Astronomers figure that if ET is at least as smart as we human are, they would have figured out that radio waves can travel very far distances without being disrupted by buildings (or stars, from an outer space point of view). This is why radio waves are used to transmit music to your car. They can hold data and travel far distances without being disrupted. Astronomers think that if ET wants to communicate with us, they will send radio signals into space. In theory, we would receive these radio signals at earth, and be able to decode whatever message was contained in them. Hopefully they are friendly!

It's not quite as easy as it sounds because there are many things in the universe, besides aliens, that emit radio waves. So removing all the "noise" and discovering an alien signal is no easy task. But SETI has been working on this since the 1970's.

Sadly they are currently lacking the funding to continue running their telescopes, and are desperately looking for rich people to donate money…. Too bad I'm not rich!  Hopefully someone will come along and assist with the funds so we can continue to search for aliens!

Stay tuned to learn about messages we've sent to aliens into space, what SETI has found, and how you can help SETI find aliens, without shelling out millions of dollars!

Image credit: SETI

Happy Birthday Hubble!

The title says it all: Happy 21st Birthday Hubble Space Telescope!