Boffins lastly uncover fact behind Infamous ‘Wow!’ alien message
Boffins investigating the alien ‘Wow!’ signal believe they have finally found the truth after finding hundreds more.
The strange signal, so-called because a volunteer circled it and wrote the words ‘Wow!’ next to it, has been a mystery since the 1970s but many felt it could be signs of alien life.
It was found by the Big Ear telescope in Ohio, which was assigned to scan the skies looking for anomalies that might point to extraterrestrial activity.
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The Wow! signal was distinctive for being brief and only detected in a narrow band of radio frequencies, which is rare for natural astronomical phenomena and also expected for alien communication.
(Image: Big Ear Radio Observatory and North American AstroPhysical Observatory (NAAPO), Public Domain)
Attempts to explain the signal over the years have been unsuccessful, despite huge advances in technology.
Now a team from the University of Puerto Rico has reported multiple observations in a nearby star that resemble the original signal, although they are around 60-100 times weaker.
Professor Abel Méndez and his team were searching data from the country’s Arecibo Observatory that was collected between 2017 to 2020 when they discovered the signals.
The giant telescope was observing nearby red dwarf stars in the hope of learning if their planets might be habitable. In the background behind a red dwarf known as Teegarden’s Star, the team noticed four signals similar to Wow! with examples also spotted in two other cases.
Méndez and co-authors said the signals are “easily identifiable as due to interstellar clouds of cold hydrogen (HI) in the galaxy.”
Méndez and co-authors now think the Wow! signal’s surge was the result of a hydrogen cloud being stimulated by something quick, like an explosion of gamma rays from neutron stars.
(Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
The Big Ear telescope had been looking near a frequency known as the ‘hydrogen line’ in space. This is also known as ‘the waterhole’, because hydrogen is a component of water and because it is thought civilizations might use this frequency to find each other, like animals at a waterhole.
Frequencies around this line are also relatively quiet, allowing communication across the galaxy.
Méndez said: “Our latest observations, made between February and May 2020, have revealed similar narrowband signals near the hydrogen line, though less intense than the original Wow! Signal.”
The team said the signals have not been seen often since, as they need a giant instrument like Arecibo to detect them
And the astronomers only noticed it because Arecibo was in “drift mode”, where it lets astronomical objects pass slowly by, exactly like Big Ear in the original detection.
If the explanation is right, the Wow! signal was the first detection of an astronomical hydrogen maser flare. It was since detected in 1989 but observed only a few times since.
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