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.
TLDR; They think it was two comets in that region of the sky with lots of hydrogen gas around them, The hz range matches what you would expect from hydrogen gas. The 2 comets were undiscovered until now.
Sounds like a swamp gas explanation but probably the most probable seeing as we have never found a signal like the "wow!" signal.
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
IANAAP, but i suspect the argument goes like this: if you're pointing a radio telescope at a comet you actually point it at the comet and take observations from the comet, you're not paying attention to any stars that happen to be near it because that's not what you're trying to observe. What is theorized to have happened in this case is that they were taking observations from the star as a comet passed in front of it, and the signal from the star was presumably modulated (or whatever the correct technical jargon is) by the comet's atmosphere, producing a signal you would not see when looking at either a comet or a star alone.
The fact that it hasn't happened many other times despite there being a lot of comets around is that space is big. You just won't believe how etc, etc.
It's a pretty simple theory and it's pretty easy to test, the only difficulty being actually getting telescope time. The only reason other astronomers are complaining is because they don't want to give up their own telescope time combined with the usual in-field competitiveness.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
On another hand, if this hypothesis worth enough and there is any doubt about it, the scientific community would free some observation time on the existing radiotelescopes to find out. So, being not the case, I conclude either the scientific community believes it doesn't worth to verify because the strength of the signal can be computed for the two comets, the hypothesis can then be checked numerically and an observation will not add any thing new, either it believes this hypothesis is very unlikely and not a valid explanation. In both case, I will pass my turn and not fund this. I already fund the other radiotelescopes from my taxes.
Achille Talon
Hop!
When I was about 7 years old Jerry Ehman rode down to Kentucky with us in the family station wagon from Powell, Ohio to Kentucky to go spelunking. We lived a few houses down the street from the assistant director of the Big Ear radio observatory who organized the trip and who invited along coworkers and friends. All the radio observatory guys on the trip were full-time radio geeks, including Jerry, who brought his own CB radio on the trip and installed it in our car before we left. This was so we could keep in touch with the other vehicles on the drive down. Jerry had temporarily disconnected our am/fm car radio antenna to wire in his CB. So he is explaining this to me as my father drives down the highway to Kentucky. Being 7, of course I asked "but what if we want to listen to the radio?". Jerry, who was riding in the center of the front bench seat of the station wagon, replies that he can switch back and forth between them. Then he immediately inverts himself in the car seat with his feet up in the air and his head pushed up under the dashboard holding a handful of tools. A few minutes later the car radio is working again.
By the way, the radio observatory at which Jerry recorded the Wow! signal no longer exits. It was a joint project between Ohio State and Ohio Wesleyan universities. It was constructed and managed by the Ohio State University but located on land owned by Ohio Wesleyan University which sold it to developers to build a golf source. There was an international effort to preserve it, Nobel price winners and other notables campaigned for it. Wesleyan believed that a golf course was much more important than SETI. "Ignorant small-town hicks" would not go far enough to describe that school.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
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
It was a subspace signal from a starship.
The signal was at the far end of subspace radio range, and had fallen in energy state until it was readable in the RF spectrum.
The starship was moving, and only in range for a few seconds.
Duh.
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?