By Tim Binnall
A team of astronomers in Japan are listening for a possible alien response to a message that was sent into space forty years ago. The intriguing attempt at interstellar communication reportedly began back in 1983 when astronomers Hisashi Hirabayashi and Masaki Morimoto relayed a series of radio signals to the star Altair, which is approximately 16.7 light years from Earth. The message, which was sent by a telescope at Stanford University, consisted of 13 drawings intended to convey human's presence on the planet as well as insights about our species and civilization. Picking up the mantle of his predecessors, astronomer Shinya Narusawa of the University of Hyogo has assembled a team which will attempt to detect a potential ET answer to the decades-old missive.
While receiving such a response would undoubtedly be a fantastic and Earth-shattering development, one would be wise to temper their expectations as the group will be using a telescope belonging to the Japanese space agency, known as JAXA, which they are only allowed to use for one hour on Tuesday night. Beyond that incredibly narrow window of opportunity, there is some question as to whether or not they may have already missed an answer from the aliens as the original message presumably reached Altair sometime around 1999 and, if the ETs responded immediately, their reply should have reached Earth approximately eight years ago.
Remarkably, it was only in 2008, three years after an alien response might have been received, that it was even discovered that Hirabayashi and Morimoto had transmitted a series of drawings back in 1983. Be that as it may, Narusawa expressed optimism that the 40-year-old message may have successfully reached a civilization that could hear it and that we might still be able to pick up their answer. "A large number of exoplanets have been detected since the 1990s," he observed, "Altair may have a planet whose environment can sustain life." Should that be the case, we can only hope that the aliens will not be offended that Earth has left them on unread for the last eight years.