“Earth calling. Can you hear us?”

Aliens (they are out there, right?) took too long to contact us. So now we’ve taken things into our own hands—to crowdsource “hailing messages”.

On June 17th, the Lone Signal project began transmitting messages written by the public from the Jamesburg Earth Station in central California. The first target: Gliese 526.

This red dwarf appears in the Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems as a good candidate to support intelligent life. Red dwarfs are abundant and survive for a relatively long time. A potentially habitable planet would orbit this type of star closely, making it easier for astronomers to detect. And it lies only 17.6 light-years away from Earth, which makes it an even more appealing target!

So, great target, but what are we planning to send? Text messages from Earth? The idea is not so far-fetched, says Lone Signal co-founder Pierre Fabre. “We’re targeting the most logical, nearest stars now.” Scientists and engineers have sent carefully-encoded interstellar radio messages in the past, but now messages can be sent by anyone with Internet access.

“It’s never been the case that anyone on the face of the Earth can commune with the cosmos, and we are opening up that portal to the masses,” said Lone Signal chief marketing officer Ernesto Qualizza.

The 144-character messages are emitted in one of two adjacent radio beams, the other containing a looped message written in computer code by astronomer Michael Busch. His message describes Earth’s position in the Universe, the elements of the periodic table, and the structure of a hydrogen atom.

To detect our messages, aliens near Gliese 526 will need a radio interferometer like the ones at the Allen Telescope Array (ATA). If they decode our messages, perhaps they will also decide to respond.

Lone Signal wants to harness human curiosity to expand our knowledge of the Universe around us. Participate here!

Alyssa Keimach is an astronomy and astrophysics student at the University of Michigan and interns for the Morrison Planetarium.

Image: Jcolbyk

Published Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, an interesting finding—turns out that pigeons like to gamble. The pigeons in the study were given two choices—they could peck at a key that always would give them three food pellets or at a key that would give them ten food pellets 20% of the time and zero the rest of the time.  All pigeons chose the gambling key over the reliable three-pellet key every time.

An article in LiveScience reported that:

The reason could be that pigeons are motivated by a surprising change from their expectations, according to study author Thomas Zentall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky. The same phenomenon could explain why human gamblers ignore their losses and focus on their rarer, but more surprising, wins.

Similar behaviors have been found in monkeys.

And just in time for the Giant’s play-offs, PLoS ONE published research on the “breaking ball” this week. The authors behind the study say that curveballs can’t break nor can fastballs rise—it’s all an optical illusion. ScienceNow has a great description of the experiment that led the scientists to their findings. Given the pitchers’ duel between Lincecum and Halladay for tomorrow’s opening game, it should be required reading for Giants and Phillies hitters.

Also in baseball science news this week, new UC Berkeley research on birth order and baseball success. It turns out that younger siblings make better ball players. The research will be published next month in Personality and Social Psychology Review.

More Gulf of Mexico oil spill news this week. Nature had an article about how reduced funding means fewer vessels in the gulf to research the effects of the spill. And in Discover, could the oil be killing thousands of fish where the Mississippi meets the gulf in Louisiana? When the image was first published, the oil was the cause, then the blame switched to agriculture run-off. Now it may be the oil after all.  More definitive testing will be done.

Finally, does Gliese 581g even exist? Two weeks ago, it was the exoplanet named most potentially habitable, but this week, Swiss scientists could neither confirm nor deny the existence of the planet. Francesco Pepe of the Swiss Team told New Scientist, “We easily recover the four previously announced planets, ‘b’, ‘c’, ‘d’, and ‘e’. However, we do not see any evidence for a fifth planet in an orbit of 37 days.” But he told Science via email that “we can’t prove there is no fifth planet.” Hmmm…

What science news did you find controversial this week? Share with us!

Creative Commons image by Minesweeper

To astronomers, a “potentially habitable” planet is one that could sustain life, not necessarily one where humans would thrive. Habitability depends on many factors, but having liquid water and an atmosphere are among the most important.

The new findings are based on 11 years of observations of the nearby red dwarf star Gliese 581 using the HIRES spectrometer on the Keck I Telescope in Hawaii. The spectrometer allows precise measurements of a star’s radial velocity (its motion along the line of sight from Earth), which can reveal the presence of planets. The gravitational tug of an orbiting planet causes periodic changes in the radial velocity of the host star. Multiple planets induce complex wobbles in the star’s motion, and astronomers use sophisticated analyses to detect planets and determine their orbits and masses.

The new planet, designated Gliese 581g, has a mass three to four times that of Earth and orbits its star in just under 37 days. Its mass indicates that it is probably a rocky planet with a definite surface and enough gravity to hold on to an atmosphere. Gliese 581, located 20 light years away from Earth in the constellation Libra, has two previously detected planets that lie at the edges of the habitable zone, one on the hot side (planet c) and one on the cold side (planet d). While some astronomers still think planet d may be habitable if it has a thick atmosphere with a strong greenhouse effect to warm it up, others are skeptical.

(Those familiar with the Academy’s originally produced planetarium show Fragile Planet—which opened in 2008—will be familiar with Gliese 581d, visualized as a potentially habitable planet.)

Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, who led the Exoplanet Survey, had this to say about the discovery:

Our findings offer a very compelling case for a potentially habitable planet. The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common.

One very interesting feature of the planet is that it’s tidally locked to its star, meaning that one side is always facing the star and basking in perpetual daylight, while the side facing away from the star lies in perpetual darkness. This could stabilize the planet’s surface climates, according to Vogt. The most habitable zone on the planet’s surface would be the boundary between shadow and light.

Universe Today gives us more details:

The researchers estimate that the average surface temperature of the planet is between -24 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit (-31 to -12 degrees Celsius). Actual temperatures would range from blazing hot on the side facing the star to freezing cold on the dark side…

The surface gravity would be about the same or slightly higher than Earth’s, so that a person could easily walk upright on the planet, Vogt said.

Vogt goes on to say in Universe Today that:

If these are rare, we shouldn’t have found one so quickly and so nearby… There could be tens of billions of these systems in our galaxy.

Cool!