Slashdot Mirror
Alien 'Wow!' Signal Could Be Explained After Almost 40 Years (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader cites a report on The Guardian: A former analyst with the US Department of Defence is on the trail of a 'cold case' -- an unexplained signal that some believe could have come from extraterrestrials. Way back in 1977 something amazing happened. Astronomer Jerry Ehman was using the Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope to sweep the sky for possible signals from extraterrestrial civilisations. He found something. While pointing towards a grouping of stars called Chi Sagittarii on 15 August, he received a powerful blast of radio waves that lasted for 72 seconds. He circled it on the readout and wrote: "Wow!" Analysis of the signal showed that it displayed all the hallmarks of coming from interstellar space, and it became something of a cause celebre for those involved in SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The trouble is that despite numerous attempts, the signal has never been observed again and so remains unexplained. Until now perhaps, thanks to the work of Professor Antonio Paris of St Petersburg College, Florida. Known as 266P/Christensen and 335P/Gibbs, they have never been investigated before because they were only discovered in 2006 and 2008 respectively. Paris found that they were both in the vicinity of Chi Sagittarii on the day that the 'Wow!' signal was detected. This could be significant because comets are surrounded by clouds of hydrogen gas that are millions of kilometres in diameter. Comet 266P/Christensen will pass the Chi Sagittarii star group again on 25 January 2017, while 335P/Gibbs will make its passage on 7 January 2018. Paris plans to observe these events to look for a recurrence of the mystery signal.In some other news, cosmologist and theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking says he doesn't expect the humanity to find intelligent alien life for at least another 20 years.
Since the summary failed to state the new hypothesis, here goes:
Professor Antonio Paris believes that the signal was generated by two comets which were discovered in 2006 and 2008. They were both in the vicinity of Chi Sagittarii when the Wow! signal was emitted. Both of these comets are surrounded by a cloud of hydrogen gas, which emits signals at a frequency of 1420MHz (the same as the Wow! signal).
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
It's probably a comet - signature matches a lot of hydrogen, and a couple of nearby comets fit the bill with their unusually massive clouds of it.
It's not the done thing to read the articles I know.
Essentially, it's been suggested that the event was caused by two comets that were undiscovered at the time. Their next passes are due soon and proposer of the hypothesis is requesting funds to buy radio telescope time during the passes. If he gets the funding and finds nothing then we won't have any explanation and can still say it might be aliens.
He can't buy time because none is available. He's looking for money to build his own.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
TL;DR:
"He didn’t find aliens but he did find two suspicious looking comets.
Known as 266P/Christensen and 335P/Gibbs, they have never been investigated before because they were only discovered in 2006 and 2008 respectively. Paris found that they were both in the vicinity of Chi Sagittarii on the day that the ‘Wow!’ signal was detected.
This could be significant because comets are surrounded by clouds of hydrogen gas that are millions of kilometres in diameter. The ‘Wow!’ signal itself was detected by Ehman at 1420MHz, which is a radio frequency that hydrogen naturally emits. He published his idea at the beginning of this year."
Still TL;DR: It's probably a comet
Even still TL;DR comet
No he can't get any telescope time, so he's buying his own. You can't get time for anything even tangentially related to extraterrestrials, it's easier to get a grant to disprove global warming. What he is attempting to do is buy his own radio telescope, then allow other astronomers to use it after he is done with his investigation.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Speaking as a professional radio astronomer, who applies for time on major telescopes a few times a year - yeah, you can get time for SETI. A guy in my office did a few months ago. You just need some hook, some reason why your particular project represents an improvement on previous efforts: some new signal-processing hardware you've built, a new localisation technique you want to try, some object that's displayed anomalous (potentially ETI) behaviour that you'd like to look at specifically. You can't just say that you want to spend a few hundred hours of telescope time repeating previous searches.
A project like the one in this article sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would get some telescope time. The article specifies that the comets transit this background star group on specific days, so presumably the total observing time is a few tens of hours, which is a typical small project. The transits are well into the future - the first one is in January 2017 - so there's plenty of time to submit proposals, which typically run on a 6-month application cycle. (The article says that existing radio telescopes are "all booked out" on these dates, which is absolute nonsense: schedules aren't set that far in advance.)
With a well-written four-page proposal, you could get a few tens of hours, sufficient for this project, on a 60+-metre-class single-dish radio telescope - far, far more radio telescope than you could build for the $13,000 budget mentioned in the article.
This really, really doesn't add up. Maybe the gofundme campaign is for money to assemble a bit of extra signal-processing hardware to use with an existing radio telescope? Or maybe it's a scam?