Several times, scientists have picked up signals that looked like evidence of intelligent life.
X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ of Toronto/M.Durant et al; Optical: DSS/Davide De Martin
When astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered a pulsar in 1967, she didn’t quite know what to make of the object’s eerie rhythm. Here’s how she described the moment in her 1977 essay, “Little Green Men, White Dwarfs or Pulsars?”: We did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission. It is an interesting problem—if one thinks one may have detected life elsewhere in the universe how does one announce the results responsibly? Who does one tell first? We did not solve the problem that afternoon, and I went home that evening very cross [as] here was I trying to get a Ph.D.
Funnily enough, Burnell and her team named the pulsar LGM-1, which stands for “little green men.” Pulsars are not celestial lighthouses built by communicative aliens, but rather periodic flashes of electromagnetic radiation produced by magnetic, rotating neutron stars. Correction: A previous version of this article claimed that Jocelyn Bell Burnell won the Nobel Prize. This is incorrect, but to be fair, she
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