Those intrigued by the question posed in this post,
– What rock group had its members’ names included in a reference in the Astrophysical Journal, unbeknownst to the editor?
may wish to look below the fold. Meanwhile people looking for serious astronomy should move along, nothing to see here…
According to Alex, the answer is The Byrds (which I would not have guessed) and has to do with SETI (which if I’d thought harder I might have guessed). I thought I knew quite a lot about the pop-culture side of SETI, but this lovely little story had escaped me. So as it may also be news to others, here it is.
IIn the mid 1960s, Caltech radio astronomers identified an unusual radio source catalogued as CTA 102. The speed at which it fluctuated led astromers in the USSR to suggest that it was an artificial source — a signal from a higher civilisation. This inspired Roger Mcguin and Robert Hippard to write a song, CTA 102, which can be found on The Byrds 1967 album “Younger than Yesterday”.
C.T.A. 102 year over year receiving you
Signals tell us that you’re there
We can hear them loud and clear
We just want to let you know
That we’re ready for to go
Out into the universe, we don’t care who’s been there first
On a radio telescope
Science tells us that there’s hope
Life on other planets might exist
According to the first critical site my browser has led me to,
The song combines the scientific abstraction of “5D (Fifth Dimension),” the jaunty melody and whimsical extraterrestrials of “Mr. Spaceman,” and the playful sonic experimentation of “2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song).
Others — notably Gav378 over here — are less impressed
I don’t love “So You Want To Be A Rock N Roll Star” and I hate “CTA 102”. It wouldn’t matter if the rest of the album was Abbey Road, with the inclusion of these tracks, it puts me off listening to the whole album.
Anyway, enough of the music criticism — on with the astronomy. CTA – 102, as you will undoubtredly have realised, was not in fact an alien civilisation sending out peace and love to all southern Californians. It was just a quasar acting in the flickering ways that astronomers quickly came to expect from such things. Nevertheless when researchers at Caltech and elsewhere went on to study other quasars and related objects at wavelengths at which CTA 102 was invisible (Schorn et al, ApJ 151, L27-L31, 1968) they noted archly that were “unable to comment upon the discussion by McGuinn, Clark, Crosby, Clarke and Hillman (personal communication).” (Hippard, while he co-wrote the song, wasn’t on the album and thus missed out.)
The man responsible for this nod seems to have been Eugene Epstein, then at the Aerospace Coropration, about whose taste in art you can read more here.
Here’s the CTA-102 story in what appear to be Roger McGuinn’s own words:
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