The 50-Year-Old Phantom Radio Signal That Has Utterly Stumped Scientists. Until Now?

Researchers may have finally traced 1977’s famous extraterrestrial anomaly back toward massive, naturally occurring hydrogen emission flares.

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Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• The source of the iconic Wow! signal has been a mystery to science for nearly 50 years.
• A group of researchers has been studying signals captured by the Arecibo telescope in order to finally uncover what may have caused the famous signal.
• It turns out that the answer may have been fairly simple all along, but we simply didn’t have the tech to find it until now.

It’s not every day that the excitement of a scientist makes its way into the history books right alongside their discovery. But that is exactly what happened with one particular finding known as the “Wow! signal.”

The Wow! signal—named for the little “Wow!” written next to it when it was spotted by astronomer Jerry Ehman in 1977 using the Ohio State University Big Ear radio telescope—was a particularly strong radio signal found during one of the first active hunts for messages sent by extraterrestrial intelligence. It lasted for 72 seconds, and considering that the threshold for possible alien communication had been set at just 36 seconds, it was definitely an appropriately labeled finding.

Unfortunately, this was not first contact. But as for what it was—well, that’s been a mystery for decades. It popped up just that once and was never detected again, leaving scientists in the dark. There have been several explanations put forth in the last several years, but they have largely been contradictory, so the issue hasn’t been settled.

Until, potentially, now. The team of scientists behind a study recently uploaded to the preprint server arXiv believes that they’ve finally cracked the case.

“Our latest observations,” Abel Méndez, who led the project that produced this paper, said in a press release, “made between February and May 2020, have revealed similar narrowband signals near the hydrogen line, though less intense than the original Wow! Signal.”

This paper represents the first results of the Arecibo Wow! project, which aimed to do exactly what this paper claims to have done: dig through data captured by the tragically collapsed Arecibo Telescope in order to find other signals that resemble (and thus, potentially explain) the Wow! signal.

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