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Originally Posted by Suzy
That looks an interesting book Gary, thank you for posting. One of those famous radio sources would have to be the pulsar in the crab nebula. When they first came across this strange signal they didn't know what to make of it (ET calling home perhaps - must have crossed their minds), and then they finally worked out what it was. We rely on it heavily don't we!
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Ha !
Last night, I watched yet another episode of "How the Universe Works - Supernova".
Kaku tells the story that during the cold war, the US military put up satellites to detect Russian nuclear detonations from orbit.
They picked up heaps of signals. They believed it was the Russians testing weapons in space. With a little more analysis, they decided that they couldn't possibly doing this as their technology simply wasn't that advanced.
Rational sense prevailed and they finally figured out that the signals were from Supernovae - one of first times anyone had detected them.
Mind you, Kaku is a bit of an 'exaggerator' … it was quite amusing though, to picture what might have been going on in the Pentagon when they first detected these mystery signals ..
Its amazing how many folklore tales are developing now that the first Astronomical RF signals detected were ~>50 years ago.
We're starting to witness, first hand, just how good humans are at turning historical scientific discoveries into mythology within the span of one lifetime ! … I thought it took longer than this ..
Cheers