Together, they searched the sky for any possible objects in that region of the sky that could explain the signal. His intrigue only deepened after meeting with the observatory director and staff. And the word ‘Wow!’ came to my mind very quickly, so I wrote it down.”īut as he poured through data from the following days, he was surprised to find the signal didn’t reappear. “It didn’t take long for me to recognize that this was extremely interesting. “It was a narrowband signal, just what we were looking for ,” Ehman said. The signal also only appeared in one of 50 possible channels. That meant the signal was likely picked up as one particular region of sky passed over the detector. But to Ehman, the data meant that Big Ear had picked up a very strong signal that started out low, increased in strength, and then dropped off again. To the untrained eye, it looks like nonsense. And on August 17, 1977, as he looked through the latest stack of papers, he spotted a set of numbers and letters: 6EQUJ5. To Ehman, reviewing large printouts of data every few days was a routine part of being a volunteer. Originally, it was constructed with funds from the National Science Foundation funds to carry out the dedicated task of creating the most accurate radio map sky ever. And it was largely built by university staff, volunteers, and part-time laborers in the 1960s. The telescope was designed by pioneering Ohio State University radio astronomer John Kraus. The Big Ear Radio Observatory was well known among astronomers in its day. At that point, a technician would show up, reset things, and start the next observing run focusing on a new patch of sky. The observatory was controlled remotely, and it could collect several days worth of data before the computer ran out of storage space. Late in the summer of 1977, Jerry Ehman sat down to review the latest batch of computer printouts detailing data collected by the Big Ear Radio Observatory, where he was volunteering as an astronomer. One-off signals like this were common back in the early days of SETI, when observatory computers were too primitive to notify astronomers of discoveries in real time, or perform rapid-fire follow-ups.īut that hasn’t stopped astronomers from repeatedly returning to this patch of sky searching for the return of the Wow! Signal. It’s like you hear chains rattling in your attic and you think ‘My god ghosts are real.’ But then you never hear them again, so what do you think?” Most importantly, Shostak says that if the signal wouldn’t have had Wow! written across it, no one would’ve ever heard of it. “Nobody has ever found another explanation for what that might have been. or was it not E.T.? Nobody knows,” Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, tells Astronomy. But others see it as a triumph of publicity over science. To some, it’s the most promising potential detection of alien life ever. However, despite many attempts to follow up on the find, the so-called “Wow! Signal” has never reappeared.įew moments in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) have captivated the public’s imagination quite like the Wow! Signal. The data looked much like what SETI astronomers expected to see from an alien intelligence. The signal lasted just 72 seconds, but when an astronomer spotted it on a computer printout days later, he was so impressed that he quickly scrawled “Wow!” in red pen across the page. On August 15, 1977, the Big Ear Radio Telescope in Delaware, Ohio, received the most powerful signal it would ever detect during its decades of observations.
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