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Alien civilisations, billions of light years away, are about to get a bit of a wake-up call in the form of the Lexus RC-F's mighty V8 engine. As part of the publicity surrounding the new Men In Black: International film, Lexus is going to transmit the 5.0-litre engine's exhaust noise into deep space.
Lexus is supplying RC-F cars as stunt vehicles for the film, which reunites Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame's Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson as the stars of the fourth Men in Black film, which also features Emma Thompson and Liam Neeson.
Partnering up with the Swinburne University of Technology's Centre for Astrophysics, Lexus has encoded the V8's deep, sonorous engine note onto a sound file, along with a message for any aliens tuning into the right frequency: "New Lexus RC-F. Earth. We've been expecting you."
On Friday the 17th of May, that message and the engine sound was transmitted by the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (UTMOST) - located on the outskirts of Canberra, Australia.
The radio telescope, which usually scans for interesting astronomical oddities within our own galaxy, was for this little stunt moved to point the signal towards Orion's Belt - a throwback to a plot point in the 1997 original Men In Black movies. The crafting of the intergalactic invitation has been led by Professor Matthew Bailes with help from Swinburne's astrophysics team and the on-campus supercomputer, OzStar.
"We're experts at listening to and decoding the naturally occurring radio transmissions from neutron stars but Lexus wanted us to invert that process," said Professor Bailes. "We had to find a solution that was both technically feasible, adhered to radio transmission regulations and didn't blow up our telescope. In a few thousand years we'll find out if anyone has heard it."