![]() It’s like a Wi-Fi signal sent between a router and a smartphone, except in this case the transmitter is a space probe and radio dishes are the receivers, says Wael Farah, a radio astronomer who helped capture the signal at the Allen Telescope Array. While the signal is transmitted via radio frequencies, that doesn’t mean one can simply slip on some headphones and listen to it. She created the radio message with two colleagues, a computer scientist and an astronomer. “We feel very privileged and, at the same time, very fragile, because we simply don’t know why we are so unique and why we exist in the first place.” “When we started realizing the size of the cosmos and had the unbearable sense of being the only civilization, that I think has been quite heavy on humans,” she says. ![]() She and her colleagues are leading a series of online workshops to encourage people to discuss the concept of alien communication, including an event she hosted yesterday at which people shared thoughts and artwork inspired by the project so far.ĭe Paulis takes inspiration from humankind’s desire to know if we have alien neighbors-and from the weight of our apparent cosmic isolation. ![]() ![]() Now it’s up to the people of Earth to crack the code, interpret the message, and-de Paulis hopes-make some art. Participating astronomers at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, the Allen Telescope Array in California, and the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station in Italy received the signal, removed the telemetry data, and posted the remaining encoded message on the project’s website for anyone to download. Her group’s project, A Sign in Space, began last week by transmitting a mysterious radio signal from the Trace Gas Orbiter, a European Space Agency craft that’s orbiting Mars. ![]()
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