July 12, 2009
Every birthday is a reminder that you are made of the same material as the stars overhead — carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, all cooked in stellar...
A Cosmic Call to Nearby Stars
Birthday · July 12, 2009
A little universe, just for you
Your date.
Ready to give.
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APOD published July 12, 2009. Credit: Yuvan Dutil & Stephane Dumas. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
If Earth received this message from deep space, could we decode it? The people from the Cosmic Call project sent the above image as the first page of a longer message. The message was broadcast toward local stars by radio telescope during the summer of 1999. Another message was sent in 2003. The single-dish, 70-meter diameter telescope that send the messages is located in Ukraine on the Crimean peninsula near the town of Yevpatoria. This first page of the Cosmic Call 1999 message, shown above, involves only numbers and so is easier for puzzle solvers to decode than a more famous message broadcast toward distant star cluster M13 in 1974. (The solution is here.)
Image credit: Yuvan Dutil & Stephane Dumas