half a century later, the mystery is complicated

Almost half a century after the Big Ear Radio Coats captured an enigmatic signal of 72 seconds from space, the mystery, far from resolving, has become more complex. An exhaustive analysis of the original 1977 data, which were believed, has revealed that the legendary signal “wow!” It was considerably stronger than was thought, and moved towards us at a much higher speed than it had been calculated.

A little context. On August 15, 1977, American astronom characters sequence “6equj5”an extraordinarily intense narrow band radio signal.

His surprise was such that he surrounded the code with a circle and wrote “Wow!” On the margin. Thus was born one of the greatest enigmas of modern astronomy and the most famous candidate to be an extraterrestrial transmission. Now, a Preliminary study posted at Arxiv.org Rewrite almost everything we knew about her.

Rescuing a treasure of 75,000 pages. New research has been an almost archaeological job. For decades it was thought that the detailed data surrounded by the ‘Wow!’ They had been lost forever, especially after Ohio’s Big Ear Observatory was dismantled in 1998 to build a golf course. Fortunately, a group of volunteers rescued most of the telescope records.

Now, researchers of the Project “Arecibo Wow!”led by Abel Méndez of the planetary habitability laboratory of the University of Puerto Rico, have digitized and analyzed more than 75,000 pages of the original forms with optical recognition technology of characters (OCR) and human supervision. This monumental effort has allowed, for the first time, to apply advanced computational methods to the original signal, revealing details that had been overlooked for almost 50 years.

The “Wow!” Signal signal Next to the scribble of astronomer Jerry Ehman

Strong, more precise, faster. The new analysis correctly corrects and refines the signal parameters, shedding new light on its possible nature. The previous estimates placed the intensity of the signal (their flow density) between 54 and 212 janskys. Corrected calculations raise that figure to a minimum of 250 janskys, confirming that It was even more powerful than was thought. Few sources of known astrophysical radio emit with that intensity, which makes it a truly exceptional event.

The frequency has also been corrected at 1,420,726 MHz, which suggests that the object was moving to us at 74 km/s, a speed that does not fit with the normal rotation of the objects of our galaxy.

On the other hand, the study reduces the search area in two thirds, refining the coordinates to two possible locations slightly displaced from the previous estimates, which could explain why decades of monitoring searches did not serve to detect it again.

Neither humans, nor comets. With these new data, researchers have been able to discard many of the proposed explanations over the years. The study rules out almost completely human origin. There were no known satellites in that position and the moon was on the opposite side of the earth, so it was not a reflection of terrestrial transmissions.

The television stations of the time could not generate a harmonic in that frequency. The form of the signal, which fits perfectly with the expected pattern of a punctual source through the telescope beam, is another argument against a local interference.

The theory that the mysterious signal “wow!” It was caused by the passage of a kitewhich at the time seemed to solve the enigma, has also been weakened with the new analysis. The extreme power and the characteristics of the reviewed signal do not fit well with the hydrogen cloud that surrounds a kite.

So what was? They were probably aliens either. Researchers point to a natural astrophysical event, but extremely rare. As I pointed out an earlier study that we cover in Xatakathe signal could come from a neutral hydrogen cloud. These clouds are common, but normally do not emit such intense and narrow band signals.

The new proposal is that the signal ‘wow!’ It was the result of a phenomenon known as Astronomical Mass Flare or an overradication outbreak from one of these clouds. Something similar to a natural microwave laser, a transitory and powerful event that would explain both the intensity of the signal and the fact that it has never been repeated again.

Images | Big Ear Observatory

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