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It's 11pm on a cold, dark December night in 1967.
While most people are tucked up in their beds,
a young PhD student waits inside an observatory just outside of Cambridge, England.
She's holding her breath as she watches a machine draw a red line onto graph paper.
She is waiting, hoping,
for any slight change in the signal from a telescope that the machine is connected to.
Then, suddenly, the pen leaps on the paper at a different rate.
It is small and fast, but unmistakable.
The second confirmation of her astronomical discovery.
I'm Ella Hubba.
And I'm Julia Ravey.
We're both scientists turned radio presenters.
And these are the stories we wish we'd known when we were starting out as scientists.
This is unstoppable for discovery on the BBC World Service.
Julia,
today I'm going to tell you a story of scientific stargazing and a mysterious signal coming from space.
Oh, aliens.
The press certainly thought that it could be,
but no. Though I think this discovery was something just as exciting,