A new explanation for the Wow! signal suggests it was a chance detection of a furious flare crashing into a hydrogen cloud. But some researchers doubt that this idea has truly cracked the case.
Picked up by the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University on August 15, 1977, the Wow! signal is the most famous candidate alien transmission scientists have detected to date. Its name comes from an astronomer’s handwritten exclamation on a computer printout charting the event’s remarkably high intensity.
Big Ear Radio Observatory and North American AstroPhysical Observatory (NAAPO)/Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Are we alone? For a moment on August 15, 1977, it certainly looked like the answer might be no. That night the Big Ear radio observatory at the Ohio State University was blasted by a remarkably intense transmission from the sky. Lasting at least 72 seconds and coming in on an extremely specific frequency, it didn’t appear to have any of the hallmarks of a natural astrophysical phenomenon. Instead it resembled what we’d expect from an artificial source.
The radio signal vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and neither it nor anything quite like it has ever been detected since in the long, unrequited search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Named the Wow! signal, after an exclamatory note that a SETI researcher scrawled on a printout of the recording, various ideas have arisen that attempt to explain it. Maybe it was strange radiation from a comet. Many researchers argue it was most likely some form of human-made radio interference. Or, just maybe, it was a message from some staggeringly advanced cosmic civilization—a possibility that, even now, has not yet been definitively ruled out—not for scientists’ lack of trying, however.
The latest explanation emerged last week from a trio of astronomers in a preprint that has not yet been subjected to peer review. And sorry, once again, it’s not aliens. The researchers suspect that the Wow! signal was created when a flare from a hypermagnetized, hyperdense star called a magnetar struck a cold interstellar cloud of hydrogen gas. The flare caused the cloud to incandesce in the radio wavelength, and this fast-and-furious outburst was detected by Big Ear.
Lead author Abel Méndez, director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico, for many years dismissed the Wow! signal as a mere instrumental glitch. But after scrutinizing several somewhat Wow!-like signals found unexpectedly in archival data from the late, great Arecibo Observatory, he and his colleagues now suspect that the famous yawp from 1977 was caused by a very rare kind of astrophysical anarchy.
“I would say, wow—I never thought of that. I never thought of the Wow! signal as being real and being produced by some weird astrophysical phenomenon,” Méndez says.
Read More – The Wow! Signal Might Not Have Been Aliens—But a Weird Cosmic Outburst
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