November 03, 2011 Text Helmut Hornung Cambridge, England, end of
September 1967. The 24-year-old astronomy student Jocelyn Bell
is hard at work on her doctoral thesis. She is evaluating data
from a new radio telescope – long strips of paper, dozens of
metres long with bumpy curves. After 30 metres of paper, the
student’s trained eye detects an irregularity. A few weeks later
Jocelyn Bell investigates this perturbation in more detail. She
discovers that they are pulses which are repeated at intervals
of precisely 1.33730109 seconds. What does it mean? They cannot
be produced by humans, because the signals always return when
the mysterious transmitter – caused by the apparent daily
rotation of the sky – moves past the stationary telescope. There
are two possible options: either the pulses originate from an
astronomical object – but from which one? - or from an alien
civilisation that is trying to communicate with Earth! And in
fact Bell and her doctoral supervisor Anthony Hewish call the
mysterious signal Littl