Posted on 10/01/2010 3:22:54 AM PDT by tlb
An astronomer picked up a mysterious pulse of light coming from the direction of the newly discovered Earth-like planet almost two years ago, it has emerged.
Dr Ragbir Bhathal, a scientist at the University of Western Sydney, picked up the odd signal in December 2008, long before it was announced that the star Gliese 581 has habitable planets in orbit around it.
Dr Bhathal had been sweeping the skies when he discovered a 'suspicious' signal from an area of the galaxy that holds the newly-discovered Gliese 581g.
The remarkable coincidence adds another layer of mystery to the announcement last night that scientists had discovered another planet in the system: Gliese 581g - the most Earth-like planet ever found.
Dr Bhathal's discovery had come just months before astronomers announced that they had found a similar, slightly less habitable planet around the same star 20 light years away. This planet was called Gliese 581e.
He went on: 'We found this very sharp signal, sort of a laser lookalike thing which is the sort of thing were looking for - a very sharp spike. And that is what we found. So that was the excitement about the whole thing.'
For months after his discovery Dr Bhathal scanned the skies for a second signal to see whether it was just a glitch in his instrumentation but his search came to nothing.
But the discovery of Earth-like planets around Gliese 581 - both 581e and 581d, which was in the habitable zone - has also caught the public imagination.
Documentary-maker RDF and social-networking site Bebo used a radio telescope in Ukraine to send a powerful focused beam of information - 500 messages from the public in the form of radiowaves - to Gliese 581.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I used to take the lid off the bottle of Carbon Tet my dad had, and sniff it. It made everything go black for a while.
Ridiculous.
Nobody ever said "cult engulfed".
;-)
Luv ya bro!
Keep up the excellent work.
LOL.
THX. I think.
Which somehow leads to the conclusion that it was not a glitch? Sheesh.
uh...I think you are off by a number of orders of magnitude. It says this star is 20 not 20 million light years away. The nearest spiral galaxy to our own is only 2.5 million light years away. 20 light years in terms of interstellar distances is quite local.
it didn’t involve saltpeter, charcoal and sulphur, did it?
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I doubt they would want him home.
Might have to start a ping list just for this topic.
“500 messages from the public in the form of radiowaves - to Gliese 581.”
Just great...now they’re coming to eat us up yum yum.
Awesome! They'll be receiving his message.... In about 20 years. lol
I hate to make fun of the guy. 20 Light years relative to the Universe really is just 'across the street' from us. Still yet.... Using the best propulsion system we have right now, it would take hundreds of thousands of years before any probe we would send could get there....
Our inability to send things from one place to another in a timely mayyer is our biggest weakness to space exploration.
We need a few thousand watchmakers, they can’t be worse than the dems...
Freegards, salute from the gripping hand
BS! No way. It was a request for 5,000 tons of Earl Grey, in return for 100 bars of gold-pressed latinum.
Earthlings seem to prefer all hands griping. ;-)
Or, for a second opinion, we have the immortal words of Pharaoh, "so mote it be!"
Used to buy that at the chemist's apothecary's drug store and/or hardware store, along with other essential---ugh, cleaning supplies.
Though, even when I was a freshman in high school in 1960, my dad had to buy me the pint of fuming nitric acid I needed....
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