The Mystery Of The Wow! Signal!

“Are we alone in the Universe?”
This is one of the most fascinating questions ever, and I personally ask it to myself every time I watch the sky at night. While we cannot give a precise answer to this question yet, you may be surprised to hear that we may have already received a communication from space… in fact, in 1977, astronomers detected a signal that may have been sent from an alien civilization! Do you want to hear more about that? Watch this video and I will tell you!
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Our story starts in 1973, at the Ohio State University, where the radio telescope named ‘Big Ear’ was assigned to look at the sky searching for signs of extraterrestrial life, as part of the SETI project. A radio telescope is like a giant antenna able to detect radio waves, the electromagnetic waves with longest wavelength.
About four years later, on the night of August 15, 1977, something unexpected happened: the radiotelescope detected a signal that was different from any other previously observed.
The first person who realized this was the astronomer Jerry Ehman, a few days later. While he was analyzing the data from Big Ear, Ehman observed a sudden jump in the intensity of the signal recorded by the telescope at 22:16 Eastern Time Zone, on the night of August 15. The signal recorded by the detector was measured over an interval of 12 seconds, and then printed out as a single character corresponding to the average of the intensity of the signal over each interval. Therefore, the output analyzed by Ehman was a sequence of characters, each of them representing the average intensity of the signal every 12 seconds.
The characters used in this system were the following: a space indicated a signal intensity of zero, numbers between 1 and 9 indicated increasing intensity, while signals with intensity of 10 or above were represented using letters: ‘A’ corresponded to a signal intensity of 10, ‘B’ to a signal intensity of 11, and so on.
Normally, the printouts analyzed by Ehman only contained a mix of space characters together with the digits 1 and 2, representing low-intensity signals corresponding to background noise. However, while checking the data from August 15, Ehman was shocked by finding a sequence of 6 consecutive characters very different from the rest: ‘6EQUJ5’. He was so surprised when he found this sequence that he circled it and he wrote the word “Wow!” next to it: consequently, this signal later became known as “Wow! signal”.
As we said before, each character represents the average intensity of the signal over 12 seconds: so, this sequence of 6 characters corresponds to a signal of 72 seconds in total. However, this doesn’t mean that the real signal coming from space lasted 72 seconds. In fact, Big Ear was configured to “watch” towards a fixed direction, relying on the rotation of the Earth to scan across the sky. Considering the speed of the Earth’s rotation and the size of the telescope, this means that Big Ear could observe a given point in space only for 72 seconds. So the Wow sequence, 6EQUJ5, was recorded during the time window in which the telescope was observing the region of space where this signal came from. 72 seconds later, Big Ear was already pointing to another portion of sky, and so the signal disappeared. The recorded intensity increases in the first half of the sequence (6-E-Q) and then decreases in the second half (U-J-5), with a peak of 30 at the centre, in correspondence of the letter ‘U’. These two facts together mean that the signal observed by Big Ear was continuous, and with a duration of at least 72 seconds, possibly more. However, we also know that the signal lasted less than 3 minutes. In fact, Big Ear consisted of two ‘feed horns’ observing the same portion of the sky three minutes apart from each other. The Wow signal, however, was detected by one of the two horns only: if it was longer than 3 minutes, both horns should have observed it.
Where did this signal come from?
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Credits: Ron Miller
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Видео The Mystery Of The Wow! Signal! канала Insane Curiosity