A signal has been received!

 

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction - but it's science fact. The planet Earth detected a laser like signal from a distant star cluster in December 2008. The signal was received by Astrophysicist Ragbir Bhathal of the University of Sydney in Australia. It made a ripple of news at the time but without confirmation and agreement from other experts in the field that it was indeed a signal - the news faded quickly. Since then confirmation that a signal was contained amongst all the other 'chatter' picked up on that evening has been verified. What makes this discovery doubly astonishing however is that the signal came from the star system known as Gliese some 20 light years away - and yesterday world-wide media confirmed that a planet representing the first truly habitable planet outside our own solar system had been discovered - where was it? You guessed it! Gliese! Gliese 581g to be precise.

 

Of the almost infinite number of star systems out there in the Universe is it simply coincidence that we discover a habitable planet and from within that star system we pick up a 'laser signal'? Dr Bhathal has tried without success to find the source of the signal again and repeat his discovery of that night in December 2008 but there are any number of reasons he may have failed to do so. Not least of which is the fact that it may not have been repeated since by whoever originated it. There is no doubting that it was received as the scientific equipment used to receive it recorded it for analysis. As of yet no sense can be made of it other than to determine that it is 'laser like'. As Dr Bhathal said of the signal once it was received - "...the signal is inside the noise. What you have to do is use another program to extract that signal out of that noise. Well, after we did that, we found this very sharp signal, sort of a laser lookalike thing which is the sort of thing we’re looking for, a very sharp spike. And that is what we found. So that was the excitement about the whole thing."

 

It is news that should hearten those who have long advocated that extra-terrestrial life has been contacting Earth for some time. Just yesterday Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and one of the leaders of the team that discovered the planet Gliese 581g was quoted as saying -  "Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say, my own personal feeling is that the chances of life on this planet are 100 per cent, I have almost no doubt about it."

By good fortune Planet Flipside located a copy of the print out of the signal which appears to bear Dr Bhathal's own handwriting upon it...little can be ascertained from it however as it is missing the X axis information which would allow us to tell how powerful the signal was. It can be seen however even from a cursory glance that the signal is significantly more powerful than the signals ordinarily received...

 

The Print out bearing the signal.

 

A Planet Flipside forum discussion on the implications of these findings can be found by clicking here