Amateur Astronomer Alberto Caballero Finds Possible Source of Wow! Signal (phys.org) 67
Amateur astronomer and YouTuber Alberto Caballero, one of the founders of The Exoplanets Channel, has found a small amount of evidence for a source of the notorious Wow! signal. Phys.Org reports: Back in 1977, astronomers working with the Big Ear Radio Telescope -- at the time, situated in Delaware, Ohio -- recorded a unique signal from somewhere in space. It was so strong and unusual that one of the workers on the team, Jerry Ehman, famously scrawled the word Wow! on the printout. Despite years of work and many man hours, no one has ever been able to trace the source of the signal or explain the strong, unique signal, which lasted for all of 72 seconds. Since that time, many people have suggested the only explanation for such a strong and unique signal is extraterrestrial intelligent life.
In this new effort, Caballero reasoned that if the source was some other life form, it would likely be living on an exoplanet -- and if that were the case, it would stand to reason that such a life form might be living on a planet similar to Earth -- one circling its own sun-like star. Pursuing this logic, Caballero began searching the publicly available Gaia database for just such a star. The Gaia database has been assembled by a team working at the Gaia observatory run by the European Space Agency. Launched back in 2013, the project has worked steadily on assembling the best map of the night sky ever created. To date, the team has mapped approximately 1.3 billion stars. In studying his search results, Caballero found what appears to fit the bill -- a star (2MASS 19281982-2640123) that is very nearly a mirror image of the sun -- and is located in the part of the sky where the Wow! signal originated. He notes that there are other possible candidates in the area but suggests his candidate might provide the best launching point for a new research effort by astronomers who have the tools to look for exoplanets. Caballero shared his findings via arXiv.
In this new effort, Caballero reasoned that if the source was some other life form, it would likely be living on an exoplanet -- and if that were the case, it would stand to reason that such a life form might be living on a planet similar to Earth -- one circling its own sun-like star. Pursuing this logic, Caballero began searching the publicly available Gaia database for just such a star. The Gaia database has been assembled by a team working at the Gaia observatory run by the European Space Agency. Launched back in 2013, the project has worked steadily on assembling the best map of the night sky ever created. To date, the team has mapped approximately 1.3 billion stars. In studying his search results, Caballero found what appears to fit the bill -- a star (2MASS 19281982-2640123) that is very nearly a mirror image of the sun -- and is located in the part of the sky where the Wow! signal originated. He notes that there are other possible candidates in the area but suggests his candidate might provide the best launching point for a new research effort by astronomers who have the tools to look for exoplanets. Caballero shared his findings via arXiv.
Uhm... SETI already searched that area (Score:3)
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I agree. The merit of the solicitation should be based on how the means to measure any activity is distinct from prior searches to avoid the fraud of:
1) Solicit
2) Blow all that dough.
3) Iterate the measurements you copied out before.
Re:Uhm... SETI already searched that area (Score:5, Funny)
"I seem to remember that SETI extensively examined that area, and nothing unusual was recorded."
Sure, but now the Aliens began cutting the antenna cables of the Arecibo observatory that was used to get the data.
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So, I agree with you - an alien species destroyed the "Wow!" signal's detector.
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Re:Uhm... SETI already searched that area (Score:4, Informative)
>and to back that we could only repeat the same observations we already did.
Umm, no. You don't use radiotelescopy to identify planets - the observations would be completely different, just of the same stretch of sky.
Sort of like how you can look at an apple orchard through a red filter and not see any apples, but that doesn't mean there are none to be seen, just that you're looking in a way that can't see what's there.
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Hi, forgot your pills?
It's simpler than that: when I spot flakiness, I aim for it.
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All SETI would have been looking for is another signal. This new information means that astronomers can look for the actual planet instead. There could be several reasons that someone would send out a strong signal only once so just looking for another signal (what SETI does) might not be as productive as looking for a planet capable of supporting an intelligence that can produce such a signal.
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This. And the fact that back in the late 70s/early 80s we didn't even have the means to search for planets in the way we do now.
Cochrane radiation ? (Score:1)
Comet ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Comet ? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Comet ? (Score:1)
I thought it had been solved a few years ago and clearly attributed to a comet...?!? I thought it was the microwave oven downstairs, but I must be conflating that with something else.
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Assumption? (Score:3)
Well, there is an obvious assumption here, and that is that the Wow! signal is being generated by a civilisation on an earth like world? So the search is biased by the dataset being used.
Re:Assumption? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, there is an obvious assumption here, and that is that the Wow! signal is being generated by a civilisation on an earth like world? So the search is biased by the dataset being used.
This is called having a hypothesis and then seeing if the evidence supports it, so obviously the search is biased.
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Well, there is an obvious assumption here, and that is that the Wow! signal is being generated by a civilisation on an earth like world? So the search is biased by the dataset being used.
This is called having a hypothesis and then seeing if the evidence supports it, so obviously the search is biased.
No, this is not what the author claims. He makes an arguably wild hypothesis (most scientists agree the WOW signal is very unlikely to be a civilization signal), and simply tries to see IF it is true, which star systems are the best candidates for a source. He does not make any "evidence supporting" claims because he knows it is pretty much a given there will be star systems fitting his description, every direction you look at (since distance is unknown), including the WOW signal directions. It is even more
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No, the author claims to be be an amateur astronomer and that he has found a possible source.
You on the other hand have done nothing but proven yourself an idiot.
Re: Assumption? (Score:1)
No, the author claims to be be an amateur astronomer and that he has found a possible source.
You on the other hand have done nothing but proven yourself an idiot.
Maybe god did it! Test of your faith? Why don't you all chase that ball a while and let real scientists do sciency stuff.
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Exactly.
I'm not sure how this is even news. There are millions of crackpot youtubers out there. But because this one has a telescope it makes it to the front page of /.?
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But it could be that the assumption is wrong, and that we can't pin the WOW! signal to the solar system Alberto Caballero is hinting at. Then we move on to the next set of assumptions.
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If you search for something, you always have to use some a priori assumptions, otherwise your search space is infinite.
But if you use dumbass a priori assumptions, in an attempt to get likes for your youtube channel, what you're searching for isn't the answer to a question. It's revenue.
Unlikely caused by aliens (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd say it's more likely a distant astronomical event, like the collapse of star, or even a very wobbly pulsar. We, as humans, have no reason for such short qand strong radio bursts, even with deep space probes like voyager, so i see very little reason extraterrestrials would require them too.
Another theory, if we are going down the intelligent life route, is that such a burst could be formed from total nuclear annihilation. The EMP from hundreds/thousands of nukes would probably be strong enough to pick up from lightyears away, and the length of time a nuclear war would last is probably about 70 seconds.
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It could have been some last resort mega nuke weapon the aliens used while having a world war. In which case I doubt we'll be hearing from them again :)
Re: Unlikely caused by aliens (Score:4, Funny)
Clearly it was the first death star blowing up finally reaching our side of the galaxy.
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You mean our side of the universe since Star Wars occurred "[a] long time ago in a galaxy far, far away". 8^)
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You mean our side of the universe since Star Wars occurred "[a] long time ago in a galaxy far, far away". 8^)
Bad pedant! Bad! :)
(and look at the post time, I was still sleepy)
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On the other hand, and somewhat science fiction-y, we could have detected some kind of deliberate offload of energy to avoid a catastrophic failure. Your power plant is going critical; you can let the planet blow up or send a ridiculous amount of energy out into space. Which do you choose?
It could also have been an alien civilization's version of the Large Hadron Collider, just in space. Perhaps they tried to open a stable wormhole and failed? ... Or succeeded, even.
Re: Unlikely caused by aliens (Score:2)
Think about what you just proposed. How do you âoesend energy into spaceâ?
If you have a power plant design that needs to dump waste energy in bulk when failing, then building some giant antenna array or microwave emitter several orders of magnitude larger than Arecibo is probably the most complicated way to go about doing it.
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The EMP from hundreds/thousands of nukes would probably be strong enough to pick up from lightyears away, and the length of time a nuclear war would last is probably about 70 seconds.
~The123King
The Great Chain of Being popped a zit. Did you ever see Simon (1980)?
Re:Unlikely caused by aliens (Score:5, Interesting)
The EMP from hundreds/thousands of nukes would probably be strong enough to pick up from lightyears away, and the length of time a nuclear war would last is probably about 70 seconds.
This is pretty insightful...
The earth at this point is a bit of an isotropic radiator. We don't really emit any focused EM which would be louder than background radiation more than a few light years away. The emissions are also not focused on a single frequency. We are a pretty weak source of EM. An alien civilization in the same stage of development would be equally weak. So I'm not even sure searching for radio signals is a good research methodology.
But your comment about a nuclear event... now that is insightful.
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We don't really emit any focused EM which would be louder than background radiation more than a few light years away.
~beheadeaswp
You sure about that? "louder" to whom?
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To anyone listening from even just a few light years away.
The sun and Jupiter are both far more powerful radio sources than anything we broadcast - it's only their distance from us that makes our own signals "legible" against their distance-weakened noise. But at interstellar distances all three of us are at basically the same distance, and our transmissions just can't compete with our neighbors. They'd need incredible signal processing and/or an incredibly focused tight-beam receiver pointed specifically
We are detectable out to 400 light years (Score:4, Interesting)
A 1970s JPL sky survey earned a Golden Fleece award for this.
I attended a talk by its lead investigator on how the alien equivalent of a UHF TV station is detectable out to 400 light years. Such a station emits an extremely narrowband signal in the form of its crystal-controlled carrier "pilot tone." This signal does not convey much information apart from the presence of a broadcast in a channel using that carrier frequency, but an extremely weak carrier signal can be detected by averaging over a long enough time.
The beauty of this is based on eavesdropping on a signal that is not purposefully beamed at us. Also, if aliens within 400 light years detect our TV stations, they could attempt to contact us, but we will not hear from them until 800 years from now.
Much of what the project was about was building a million-channel Fourier analyzer to detect such signals across a wide radio band, which was a big deal with 1970s hardware available to the project. In 40 years, Moore's Law means we exceed that frequency coverage by many orders of magnitude. What SETI At Home is doing, is farming out running such spectrum analyzers to Web connected PCs.
The professor who organized this seminar asked, "What happens if the aliens stop broadcasting and use fiber optic cable?" This was quite a forward-looking question to ask in the late 1970s when fiber optic cables were not widely deployed and the technology for splicing such cable and coupling semiconductor light sources into an optical cable was new. 40 years later, it is entirely plausible that broadcast TV stations might become a historical artifact.
A couple years ago, I was given a tour of a local TV station. With the transition to digital, I was concerned that if the aliens had gone digital, we may not detect them, but the station's chief broadcast engineer showed me the pilot tone appearing on their transmitted signal. So even though the aliens may not be able to make sense of the digitally coded broadcast, they can still detect us out to 400 light years -- or more.
Our best hope is of detecting alien cultures that are tired of paying the 100 dollars a month for fiber optic TV and have reverted to rabbit-ear antennas to get broadcast TV?
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We don't really emit any focused EM which would be louder than background radiation more than a few light years away
Yes we do. The brightest emissions from Earth at a great distance are the BMEWS (ballistic missile early warning system) radars [nasa.gov] that are detectable to 15 light years with a clone of the Arecibo radio telescope (sadly now in ruins and being demolished), and that a thousand 100-m dishes (once proposed for a Project Cyclops) would be able to detect us to 250 light years.
Re:Unlikely caused by aliens (Score:4)
> It would be hard to pick up our own radio broadcasts from nearby solar systems, let alone a short burst from hundreds of lightyears away.
I don't get why this comes up on every SETI thread. Traditional SETI looks for intentional radio beacons, built by intelligent lifeforms to announce their presence to other lifeforms. NOT detecting radio leakage from other civilizations. The WOW! signal looks like what a beacon might look like.
The better criticism is why, after WOW!, was another spike never detected from the same location again, if it was what SETI was looking for.
Plenty of speculation that could never be proven, as to why, could be made, but it's irrefutable that after quite a while, on human scales, we never saw it again.
Who knows, maybe we're just too short-lived and poor to be in this game. The Universe is vast - maybe we only get a beacon pointed our way every few hundred years. In our current state we can't imagine monitoring every star in our light cone for centuries and being patient for results. Check back in 2350 to see what a peaceful, prosperous society might do.
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''Check back in 2350'' And that will be too late for use to know...
It's a simple warning to us about The Borg. We now realize resistance is futile, and we will be assimilated.
We are the Borg (Score:2)
You will be assimilated comes before resistance is futile.
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>The better criticism is why, after WOW!, was another spike never detected from the same location again, if it was what SETI was looking for.
Given the astronomical power requirements for such a beacon, I don't that that's very unusual at all. In fact, if we wanted to generate such a powerful signal it would have to be incredibly tightly focused, to the point that it would take us centuries to sweep across the entire sky just once before we broadcast to any star a second time.
The bigger argument against
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The modulation argument is not really a thing. The data was only recorded at one sample for each ten seconds, so you literally could not detect any reasonable modulation with the instrumentation used. Even something as slow as Morse code would come across as a constant strength signal. You could only see if they were literally going "ten seconds on, ten seconds off".
My argument against the alien source is that the frequency is only a tiny bit blue-shifted from the hydrogen line. The odds that a distant alie
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Oops. Of course I meant km/s not m/s.
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Obviously. I hope you've got at least a couple drinks under your belt to blame it on ;-)
I find it odd though that you'd disagree so diametrically with the experts. It seems the consensus is that the hydrogen line would be an obvious place to broadcast a "we are here" beacon, since it would be universally recognized as a "special" frequency worth monitoring and, presumably, have relatively few natural sources. After all, anything natural that stimulated hydrogen enough to broadcast a powerful signal woul
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I didn't realize the time resolution was so low, thanks for that important detail.
You're quite right, if that's the case it may have been very modulated and we wouldn't have noticed. Though, it does depend somewhat on how it was sampled - instantaneous sampling should have fluctuated a lot, at least assuming AM rather than FM, and average sampling... well it should have fluctuated a bit, and perhaps quite a lot if we were lucky... Unless it were modulated quite quickly, which would seem a bit excessive fo
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If you did build such a beacon would you continuously point it at the exact same point in the sky at all times or would you send the beacon pulse in a different direction each time you set it off (assuming it was a pulse and not a continuous beam)? Depending on how far away the actual source is it wouldn't take too much for the beam to slightly off the exact same point when it is triggered and if the source is far enough away a fraction of a degree may be enough of a difference that a subsequent signal woul
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The EMP from hundreds/thousands of nukes would probably be strong enough to pick up from lightyears away
I find this extremely doubtful. What are you basing this on, just that nukes make a big flash on human scales?
More likely than you think (Score:5, Informative)
I highly doubt that such a strong, and short-lived radio burst would be caused by aliens.
The Ohio State University radio (the one that heard the "wow" signal) is fixed in place and cannot be moved.(*) The receivers sweep across the sky with a fixed aperture.
They were searching for signal strength in 50 frequency bands, and the "Wow" signal came on for 72 seconds in one band - the one at 1,420 MHz - and the signal strength was distributed over that time.
This is exactly the result one would get from a small signal aperture sweeping across the sky: the signal comes into alignment and goes out of alignment, and the 72 second burst aligns nicely with the known aperture size of the feed horn.
The antenna actually had *two* feed horns receiving signals from the antenna, and the other horn - looking at a slightly different section of the sky - had no unusual signal during the "Wow" incident. This strongly suggests that the signal did not arise from terrestrial interference, or some equipment failure in the receiver past the feed horn amplifiers.
The 1,420 MHz frequency is the hydrogen frequency line and has been suggested as an obvious frequency to use for interstellar communication, on the assumption that another intelligent civilization would make the same assumption.
There's no direct evidence that the event was made by aliens, but it's certainly suggestive.
Hackaday has a good article [hackaday.com] explaining the event and the associated hardware.
(*) Glossing over some details, but essentially correct.
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One possibility, unlikely but maybe no more so than aliens, is a software glitch. The signal was found only by examining a printout several weeks after the signal was detected. The software that generated the printout was written by astronomers and electrical engineers rather than programmers, and was spaghetti code, patched and re-patched many times. Nobody thought to get a printout of the whole thing until several years later, by which time it had be patched and re-patched many times again. It might be th
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Well, the universe the putative aliens live in is also likely to have hydrogen as the commonest element, and that hydrogen is also likely to have an absorption band at 1420MHz (or they have different electron mass, proton mass, or quantum of charge in their universe), so the same fr
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Sure, some sort of astronomical event is always the default assumption, however, so far nobody has proposed a credible explanation for what kind of event would cause such a powerful, sustained, narrow-band the signal (estimated at no more than 10kHz wide). It is very close to the main hydrogen line, corresponding to a blue-shift of a source moving towards us at 10km/s, so there's that - if something made hydrogen glow like mad that might explain it. But with such a powerful source I think you'd normally
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The signal was in a very tight frequency band so it's hard to imagine a natural source. Nuclear explosions wouldn't do this either. "Stuff blowing up" will send out all kinds of frequencies.
It's not known how long the actual emission was; the 72 seconds is the window during which the detector was looking at the source. The event began sometime before that window, and ended sometime after it. What's really interesting about this is that the intensity curve during the 72 seconds appears to be entirely shaped
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It would have to be something almost stationary in the field of view for at least those 72 seconds (possibly much longer). So, not a plane or satellite, and geostationary orbit would be over the equator. The hydrogen-farting comet hypothesis is highly likely.
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Says you. I've worked with signals transmitting at a half-baud - and made decisions costing hundreds of thousands of dollars on their basis. Just because it's a low-transmission rate doesn't mean it's not important.
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It could be like a lighthouse. You only see a flash, while in reality, it is a continuous rotating beam.
So assuming it is aliens (I don't think it is), we could imagine a very narrow beam that earth got caught into. It can be by chance: the aliens sent a signal between two planets and Earth happened to be aligned. Or maybe they were scanning the universe like a radar. Maybe they really wanted to send us a message and pointed a powerful, highly focused emitter straight at the earth while their own day-to-day
QRZ (Score:2)
Just for context. Yet again full justification for amateur usage of bandwidth.
Jerry Ehman AC8IV https://wireless2.fcc.gov/UlsA... [fcc.gov]
I Dropped My Books on the Antenna Cable (Score:2)
Same Signal? (Score:2)
It better be 6EQUJ5 or it ain't the same. (Reminds, me, I thought I once saw a car license plate with that on it. And it was much closer than 2MASS 19281982-2640123.)
I for one... (Score:2)
Old news? Bad news? (Score:1)