April 8: Project Ozma listens to the stars

On April 8, 1960, in a small town in the mountains of West Virginia, in the United States, a young astronomer began listening to the sky in search of someone.

What happened

The astronomer was Frank Drake, 29, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, in Green Bank. That morning, he pointed a 26-meter antenna at the star Tau Ceti, about 12 light-years from Earth. When the star set, he pointed at another, Epsilon Eridani. The receiver was tuned around 1420 MHz, the frequency of the hydrogen line.

Drake named the search Project Ozma, after the princess of the land of Oz, from L. Frank Baum's books, a place far away and hard to reach. Between April and July, there were about 200 hours of observation.

In the first days, a strong signal excited the team. Days later, they found it was interference of human origin. Beyond that, the equipment recorded only noise. No signal from another civilization was found.

Why it matters

Project Ozma is considered the first modern search for intelligence beyond Earth carried out with a radio telescope. The choice of frequency came from a 1959 paper by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, in the journal Nature: if any civilization wanted to be heard, it would make sense to use the frequency of the most abundant element in the universe, which any being that studied the cosmos would know.

The result was silence, and the silence opened an entire field of science. The next year, in November 1961, Drake gathered scientists at Green Bank and wrote on a board the equation that bears his name, still used to organize the questions about intelligent life in the galaxy.

The bridge to Bairo's vision

The project Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez founded is called 1420, the same frequency Drake listened to. Bairo calls it the frequency of silence. The band from 1400 to 1427 MHz is protected by international agreement, under the International Telecommunication Union: in it, emissions are prohibited, so that radio astronomy can listen to the universe. No one transmits there, not even Bairo's project. The number is a symbol.

April 8 is the perfect date to understand that symbol. Listening and hearing nothing wasn't Drake's end. It was the beginning. In Bairo's story, no occupies that same place: it's the foundation of yes.

Read: The frequency of silence · No is the foundation of yes

Read also: Frank Drake and the silence of 1420 MHz · March 25

Sources

• Project Ozma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ozma
• Sky & Telescope, "Project Ozma: The First SETI": https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/project-ozma-the-first-seti/
• Cosmic Search, "A Reminiscence of Project Ozma", by Frank Drake: https://www.bigear.org/vol1no1/ozma.htm
• Universe Today, "Ozma and the Drake Equation": https://www.universetoday.com/articles/a-brief-ish-history-of-seti-part-ii-ozma-and-the-drake-equation
• Protection of the 1400–1427 MHz band (ITU, footnote RR 5.340): https://www.e-callisto.org/generaldocuments/RAS-Allocations-RR2016.pdf