The 'Wow! Signal'

You know sometimes when you’re alone and bored and a message notification pops up on your social media account and you feel excited? Well, on August 15th 1977, the scientists working at Ohio State University’s ‘Big Ear’ radio telescope in the US received one such message notification. Wait, they surely didn’t have Instagram or Twitter, right? Then how?

Okay things are about to get pretty intense, so buckle up. This message came from OUTER SPACE!

WOW! What? How?

Let’s be clear people. It obviously wasn’t your “What’s up bro?” or “Hey baby!” texts. It was a strong narrowband radio signal that lasted 72 seconds and seemed to be coming from the ‘M55 cluster’ in the constellation ‘Sagittarius’ and bore all the expected characteristics of extra-terrestrial origin.


Talk about going through pages after pages of numbers collected from the telescope every day; I don’t know about you guys, but I think I’ll pass. It was astronomer Jerry R. Ehman who had this responsibility and are we glad he did not stop. He observed this anomaly and was so impressed by the results that he went on to circle the portion of the data "6EQUJ5" and wrote near it “WOW!”. And hence the name, The ‘Wow! Signal’.







If you’re thinking, “What the hell is 6EQUJ5?”, we’ve got you covered. It’s the variation in the intensity of the signal expressed in the particular measuring system adopted for the experiment. 1 is really small, 2 is better and so on till it reaches 9. Every increase after that is replaced by letters in the English alphabet.







Here’s the catch. If the wave was any shorter than 10 seconds and any longer than 72 seconds, the telescope would not have been able to detect the signal. Now is that a coincidence? We’ll probably never know. Why you ask? Because no such signal has ever been detected after this. An Organization called SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) ran this operation for years and they were unable to find even a single signal remotely identical to the ‘Wow! Signal’.


Why could this be? One possible explanation is that the ‘Wow! Signal’ as mentioned earlier seemed to be coming from the ‘M55 cluster’ in the constellation ‘Sagittarius’ which is over 17000 light years away from earth. So, even if there are aliens sending us photos, videos and texts constantly, it probably won’t reach us any time soon. The ‘Wow! Signal’ might have been sent a couple of centuries ago; the bottom line is we’ll never know.


Now let’s examine this in the view of our sceptic friends who might now be saying “Not this alien $#*! again”. A study published by Antonio Paris, adjunct professor of astronomy at St. Petersburg College, Florida and ex-analyst of the U.S. Department of Defence, suggests that the signal might just have been generated by a comet. Two comets ‘266P/Christensen’ and ‘P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs)’ were passing through the part of the sky the Big Ear Radio Observatory was surveying in 1977 and the hydrogen cloud on one of the comets might have caused the famous signal. The comet moved on in its orbit and maybe that’s why we haven’t received the signal again.


Now to be honest we secretly root for ET, so this bummed us out as well; but even the comet theory is not scientifically proven. So, no one knows what caused the signal.


But we humans love aliens so much (Ehem, “Bring me Thanos!”). So, in 2012, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico beamed a digital stream, comprising of more than 10000 twitter messages made for this purpose by the National Geographic Channel, towards ‘Hipparcos 34511, 33277, and 43587’. Again, it’s so far away that by the time ‘they’ get the message and send a reply, none of us are likely to be around. It’s like the world’s most boring game of catch.


So, to wrap this up, don’t expect to see any UFO’s flying around because of this signal; but if you do, don’t forget to video tape it.


We at ‘Sciendrome’ will always keep an eye out!

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