Trevor Collins

You know, when you look up at the sky with your naked eye, maybe through a telescope, you're literally missing 99.99% of the universe because we see, let me do the math, we see with our eyes 0.0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum.

That's not a lot at all.

Not at all.

That's just how we evolved.

But yeah, so suffice to say, there's a huge band and these radio telescopes allow us to study objects in space beyond what we would see with our eyes.

And so that's why we have sensors for all portions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Today, we're just going to be sitting way over in the long wavelength territory of radio.

Okay, so the signal was captured at Ohio State University, Big Ear, and this signal was detected in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius near a group of stars called Chi Sagittarii.

This is in deep space.

I forgot I actually had a second image to go along with what I was talking about.

But if you take a look at this second image here, you'll see why ground-based

you know that's why we got satellites up there to analyze other things because our atmosphere helps block out many of these wavelengths that would be quite harmful to us obviously not all of them some ultraviolet does get down here and give us our sunburns but right thankfully we're not being pummeled by x-ray and gamma rays thanks to the atmosphere but the other image i wanted to show you is the constellation and where this signal seems to have come from thanks to phys.org

So this is the night sky as it would have been seen on August 15th, 1977.

Yeah.

And you think it's simple, right?

You're like, well, just unwind where the planet was in relation to the sun.

And there you go.

But you also have to remember our solar system is flat.

flinging around the galaxy the galaxy itself is flinging around space and so you know you have to kind of backtrack a little bit you know obviously everything moves relatively slowly because it's all so far apart but i just love it so yeah you can basically back out

where they were aiming at that specific time that the signal came in.