However, even Paris’ theory doesn’t seem to be accepted by everyone. Pair of Supermassive Black Holes Closest to Earth They also tested readings by three different comets and found results in the data very similar to the Wow! Signal. They elaborated on their theory by proving that two different comets had been in the exact area that the Big Ear telescope had been monitoring that night. He and his team argued that the movement of a comet would explain why the signal was never heard again. Petersburg College in Florida, published a paper in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences that proposed that the signal may have come from a hydrogen cloud accompanying a comet. More recently, astronomer Antonio Paris, out of St. Other theories posit a possible supernova and even a glitch in the university’s computer system. However, since no other telescopes picked up the signal that night, those two theories seem to wash out. Initial explanations included a stray signal from an unknown military satellite and possibly even a signal that may have bounced off the Moon. There have been many theories put forward to explain the Wow! Signal. The signal intensity of 10 to 11 was represented by the letter A, and 11 to 12 was represented by a B, and so on. 0s and 1s were simply silent delays in computer processing, while numbers ranging from 1 to 9 indicated a range of low to mid-intensity cosmic signals. The university’s computer system to measure the intensity of signals from space used a simple alpha-numeric code. The data that came back from the signal stood out amongst the low numbers of background noise. One of the team members, Jerry Ehman, recorded a 72-second signal that, at the time, was pointed at a group of stars called Chi Saggittarii in the Sagittarius constellation. In August of 1977, a team of astronomers at Ohio State Observatory detected something unusual while using “The Big Ear,” the appropriately named radio telescope at Ohio State University.
But in 1977, a lone radio astronomer in Ohio detected a signal that was so out of the ordinary that he couldn’t help but scribble one word next to the data he’d received “Wow!” Background: What is the “Wow!” Signal? "There are billions of stars in the galaxy, and we have to figure out some way to narrow them down," she added.The search for extraterrestrial life using radio signals has been an uphill battle for decades, yielding very few results. "I think this is perfectly worth doing because we want to point our instruments in the direction of things we think are interesting," Rebecca Charbonneau, a historian who studies SETI at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and who wasn't involved in the work, told Live Science. While living organisms may exist in a wide variety of environments around stars quite dissimilar to our own, he chose to focus on sun-like stars because "we're looking for life as we know it." Given his results, he thinks it "could be a good idea to search for habitable planets, and even civilizations." Caballero's findings appeared May 6 in the International Journal of Astrobiology (opens in new tab). "I found specifically one sun-like star," he said, an object designated 2MASS 19281982-2640123 about 1,800 light-years away that has a temperature, diameter and luminosity almost identical to our own stellar companion. Knowing that the Big Ear telescope's two receivers were pointing in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius on the night of the Wow! Signal, Caballero decided to search through a catalog of stars from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite to look for possible candidates. The Wow! Signal may have been something similar, he added. Still, Caballero noted that in our infrequent attempts to say hello to E.T., humans have mostly produced one-time broadcasts, such as the Arecibo message sent toward the globular star cluster M13 in 1974. The Wow! Signal most likely came from some kind of natural event and not aliens, Caballero told Live Science, though astronomers have ruled out a few possible origins like a passing comet.
Researchers have since repeatedly searched for follow-ups originating from the same place, but they have turned up empty, according to a history from the American Astronomical Society (opens in new tab).
"Since hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, there is good logic in guessing that an intelligent civilization within our Milky Way galaxy desirous of attracting attention to itself might broadcast a strong narrowband beacon signal at or near the frequency of the neutral hydrogen line," Ehman wrote in his anniversary report. 2MASS 19281982-2640123, a sunlike star in the Sagittarius constellation (Image credit: PanSTARRS/DR1)
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