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 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.
īefore the nature of the signal was determined, the researchers, Bell Burnell and her PhD supervisor Antony Hewish, considered the possibility of extraterrestrial life: Researchers Thomas Gold and Sir Fred Hoyle identified this astronomical object as a rapidly rotating neutron star immediately upon their announcement. Bell Burnell noted that other scientists could have discovered pulsars before her, but their observations were either ignored or disregarded. The original signal turned out to be radio emissions from the pulsar CP 1919, and was the first one recognized as such. The discoverers jokingly named it little green men 1 ( LGM-1), considering that it may have originated from an extraterrestrial civilization, but Bell Burnell soon ruled out extraterrestrial life as a source after discovering a similar signal from another part of the sky. Due to its almost perfect regularity, it was at first assumed to be spurious noise, but this hypothesis was promptly discarded. It was detected by individual observation of miles of graphical data traces.
It originated at celestial coordinates 19 h 19 m right ascension, +21° declination. The signal had a 1.337 302 088 331-second period and 0.04-second pulsewidth. In 1967, a radio signal was detected using the Interplanetary Scintillation Array of the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory in Cambridge, UK, by Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
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