Mysterious wow signal from far away space

 Wow signal

On the night of August 15, 1977, a little after 11:00 p.m. local time Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope picked up a signal lasting 72 seconds. Over 40 years later the signal remains unexplained and represents the best candidate for evidence of an alien civilization that we have yet seen the signal should at every pede would potentially be the greatest discovery in human history it would tell us that we are not alone.

The signal was not initially seen by a human rather an aging mainframe computer at the Big Ear observatory. The observatory was mostly automated and produced printouts of interesting signals that picked up. These printouts were periodically picked up and dropped off at dr. Gerry havens house where he would go through them and see what was there a few days after it was received he noticed the signal 6eq uj5. The signal was the strongest he'd ever seen from the telescope and indeed remains the strongest the Big E received across its lifetime with SETI consequently dr. Ayman wrote the word Wow on the printout circling the signal after analysis of the data the signal proved to have all of the hallmarks expected from an alien technological signal. The first noteworthy attribute of the WoW signal is of course its strength in fact that's what the famous 6eq uj5 reflects that sequence is not as is sometimes claimed a message rather it shows the rising and falling and intensity of the signal the system worked like this. It starts with between 0 & 1 reflected with a special character the number 1 for between 1 & 2 and goes up to 9 after 9 it continues on with letters of the alphabet a being between 10 and 11 b-being 11 and 12 and so on while goes up to you so represents a maximum measured signal strength 30 times higher than the background noise.

Now the natural question is was anything like a message present in the data and the answer is no. The signal appears to have been a nun modulated signal it didn't look like something that would come in from a radio station rather it was a raw a continuous radio wave the rising and falling in intensity was simply due to the radio telescope sweeping by the signal rather than anything from the source. Due to the telescope's position being fixed to the planet and subject to its rotation but there is one point here that should be mentioned if the signals modulation was less than 10 seconds or longer than 72 seconds then the telescope would not have been able to detect it. So it can't be ruled out that there wasn't a message there we simply have no evidence that there was within what modulation could be detected, so I say again claims that there was some kind of message contained in the WoW signal are erroneous nothing was there that the telescope could see but that rising and falling of intensity is important it means that whatever the WoW signal was it was coming from a fixed point in the sky. The big year was originally designed by dr. John Krauss for all Sky broadband radio surveys which it quite successfully did revealing thousands of radio sources in the sky after funding for the Ohio Sky Survey ceased the telescope was repurposed to look for narrowband signals typically SETI signals this meant that the telescope was uniquely suited to see signals that were fixed in the sky as the telescope were rotated with earth. While looked just like a continuous deep-space signal should rather than interference from Earth which would not rise and fall in this way.

The next noteworthy aspect of the WoW signal is its frequency. The exact frequency determined by dr. Ayman was fourteen 20.4 or five five six megahertz the frequency of 1420 megahertz is very important to study for a very good reason if you're going to send out a blind radio signal into the galaxy in hopes of getting someone's attention, and you don't know who that is you need to pick a frequency to do it at where other scientists with radio telescopes in the galaxy might naturally be looking. This is easier said than done because there are a lot of frequencies you can use the electromagnetic spectrum is enormous so you need a benchmark SETI scientists reasons that a good benchmark would be something that emits radio in nature at a set frequency. luckily we have this in the form of neutral hydrogen which also happens to be the most abundant element in the universe, and it emits radio under certain circumstances at 1420 megahertz. 

All scientists in the galaxy with radio telescopes would be aware of this providing a natural frequency choice to broadcast at it's worth noting here that 1420 megahertz is a protected frequency by international agreement in other words no one is supposed to broadcast at that frequency, so radio astronomers may study it and not just for study purposes but radio astronomy in general because of its association with hydrogen. Therefore, in 1977 no one on earth should have been broadcasting at this frequency or nearby it this doesn't illuminate spy satellites illicitly transmitting at this frequency but there are serious issues with that one is that if you're going to downlink your spy transmissions you wouldn't want to put them in a frequency where they would stick out like a sore thumb to radio telescopes all across the earth including those of rival countries. The second is a feature of the Big Ear telescope the signal matched the antenna pattern which implies that whatever it was it had to be at least as distant from the transmitter as something close to the orbit of the moon nearer objects to the Big Ear showed a wider pattern effectively eliminating the possibility that it was a satellite transmission in low-earth orbit nevertheless all public satellites were checked and none were in the vicinity of the while signal so if it had been a spy satellite it was one that was very distant out past the moon which doesn't make a lot of sense. Transmitting at a protected frequency that also doesn't make a lot of sense still it could be that there was a spy satellite in solar orbit watching something but that seems very unlikely 

Now why is the WoW signal slightly above the exact frequency of 1420 megahertz this is uncertain if it corresponds to a blue shift of the signal assuming it started out at 1420 exactly then it would mean that whatever emitted the WoW signal is moving towards us at about 10 kilometers per second. Which is not that fast in terms of space travel Voyager 2 is on its way out of the solar system at a little over 15 kilometers per second relative to the Sun and while that does correspond to 35,000 miles per hour in terms of the galaxies it will take Voyager to 42,000 years before it passes anywhere close to another star system so if the WoW signal source is moving it's moving very slowly now if it were intentionally slightly above the frequency then it brings up something that isn't often mentioned about the while signal. It appeared to be corrected at the source for red and blue shift this is noted by Bob Dixon and is right up on the big ears website. Sadly the website in the data are more or less all that's left of the bigger telescope which was demolished in the late 1990s when the land was sold the detection of this correction was a feature of the experiment itself Dixon details that their study experiment was corrected for the Doppler effect to the Galactic standard of rest this assumes that a civilization would correct their signal for the Doppler effects of the motions of their planet the motion of their star system were on the Milky Way and so on likewise the scientists of the Big Ear compensated for the motion of earth and our star system. This would suggest that the WoW signal was corrected

Yet another feature of the WoW signal that strongly suggests a technological origin is that the signal was narrowband meaning it didn't leak over into nearby frequencies. Nature doesn't like to produce a narrowband radio signals and only does so under very specific conditions such as with natural masers which were asked for physical and origin but nothing like the WoW signal but what does produce narrowband signals is technology. This makes sense taking out wideband signals takes energy so to avoid wasting energy and bleeding into other frequencies we set our technology up to be narrowband, ilion's would likely do the same because it simply seems to make more practical sense though even this is debated but the WoW signal wasn't just narrowband. It was a very narrow band the signal was at most about 10 kilohertz wide which is somewhat narrower than a typical earth-based transmission like television or radio, which by their nature are narrowband.

Whatever was producing a signal it was doing so very efficiently now where exactly was the origin of the WoW signal. This is very uncertain what can be said is that the signal came from one of two patches of sky located in the constellation saggitarius what not thing about this is that the plane of the solar system the ecliptic also passes through this constellation this might be where you might expect a solar system origin for the signal in other words very close by somewhat disconcerting if it has an alien origin, or it could just be coincidence as the Milky Way's central bulge also lies in that constellation. There's a lot of stars there though no obvious star system is in either possible patches of sky for a while the reason for the uncertainty as to the exact location in the sky is because the Big Ear had to feed horns which meant that there were two beams observing the same patch of sky twice separated by a short delay of about three minutes. This helps to cancel out earth-based interference but there was no way to tell which horn actually saw the WoW signal leading to two possible locations but this in itself leads to something odd only one feedhorn saw the signal. This would imply that the signal either shut off or turned on while the Big Ear was looking at it what that might mean is anyone's guess but one possibility that's been advanced is interstellar scintillation lots of radio telescopes far more sensitive than the Big Ear have looked in both patches of sky for the signal none have seen it including the Very Large Array. One somewhat unlikely scenario is due to interstellar scintillation a very weak signal perhaps from far away in the Milky Way and thus a long time ago just happen to get amplified in the interstellar medium just one one feet horn if the Big Ear happened to pass by and the conditions weren't no longer right when the other passed by that doesn't seem likely.

But what if the other explanations that have been put forth over the years the answer is none have held up there was no solar system planets in the vicinity at the time and the possibility that an earth signal might have bounced off an object in the solar system seems very unlikely and others that we only saw the signal because it was briefly gravitationally lensed by an object in the foreground but that doesn't seem likely to have changed over such a short time glitches in the equipment are also not satisfying since the equipment never showed any such glitches again and the most recent explanation advanced was that comets could have been the culprits I hear this a lot and the media covered it extensively, but this one met with much criticism from the scientific community in the weeks and months after the problem is neither of the possible comets that were around at the time were in the right place and secondly if comets produced a strong neutral hydrogen radio signal radio astronomers would have noticed that by now so no the WoW signal was apparently not due to comets and the alien possibility stands so to recap we have a narrowband signal that looks technological exactly on the radio dial where an alien transmission might be expected that originated further out than the moon possibly distantly in the galaxy emitting very powerfully in other words all the hallmarks of a signal from an alien civilization but unfortunately that's all there is numerous subsequent searches by many different telescopes have been performed and the signal never repeated probably. The problem with the while signal is compounded by the fact that if it's periodic then we have no idea how often it repeats astronomers can't watch that area of sky continuously radio telescope time is coveted and limited and there's a lot of radio astronomy to be done other than study so the best that can be done is someone occasionally gets time to point a telescope towards where while was and see if it's there again. Enter amateur radio astronomer Robert H gray who did much work and wrote a book the elusive while searching for extraterrestrial intelligence and even built his own radio telescope to monitor for a while as much as he could, he never found anything mostly while grey and colleagues didn't pick up anything resembling Wow they did find much more broadband radio sources in the vicinity in short all they ever saw were bad candidates of a candidate signal, and they're observing runs lasted for hours at a time still it could just be that while repeats on a period longer than anyone can look perhaps tens of hours or more or whatever the rotation of the planet of origin is or the transmitter itself changes directions but today the WoW signal has not been picked up a second time and that's a problem if you can't study the signal you can't verify it as such the rule of thumb and study is that if a signal doesn't repeat it doesn't really matter what it was because you can't ever confirm it and that's the one thing the while signal doesn't do it does not confirm the existence of an alien civilization it's a simple signal of interest that should be looked at again but say it was an alien civilization then what does the WoW signal say ultimately the wow signal says only a scant bit providing there was actually no modulation present it says that some aliens out there have a radio transmitter and are capable of doing science and know about the hydrogen line other than that it would be a message that simply says here we are and little else to the point that even if it were an alien signal we may never know anything more about that civilization but it would be enough to say that we are not alone, and I wonder what would happen if someday the signal repeated.