Famous 'Alien' Wow! Signal May Have Come From Distant, Sunlike Star

Researchers may have pinpointed the source of a famous supposed alien broadcast discovered nearly a half century ago. Space.com reports: The prominent and still-mysterious Wow! Signal, which briefly blared in a radio telescope the night of Aug. 15, 1977, may have come from a sun-like star located 1,800 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. "The Wow! Signal is considered the best SETI (or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) candidate radio signal that we have picked up with our telescopes," Alberto Caballero, an amateur astronomer, told Live Science. [...] 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. 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 may have been something similar, he added.

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. "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. Caballero's findings appeared May 6 in the International Journal of Astrobiology. "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. "There are billions of stars in the galaxy, and we have to figure out some way to narrow them down," she added.

But she wonders if looking for only sun-like stars is too limiting. "Why not just look at a bunch of stars?" she asked.

Headline Misleading

[greytree]

Finding a sun-like star in the large number of stars in the area where the signal came from is not surprising, and certainly does not mean that that star is where the signal came from.

Re:Headline Misleading

[JanSand]

Whether or not the signal originated from a planet 1800 years ago, the concept of a galactic community of intelligent life in conversational contact in any meaningful way seems an impossibility unless there are communication possibilities faster than the speed of light. The very little I comprehend of quantum theory might have some way to overcome this very basic problem but I have heard nothing even vaguely theoretical to remedy this. Nevertheless, if any sense can be made of these possible communications, the alien viewpoint possibilities would, no doubt, be of interest.

Re:Headline Misleading

[jd]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

This is the place to start.

The conjecture states that entangled particles are wormholes. The idea is that the reason entanglement breaks when you try to use them to send information is that wormhole theory predicts that wormholes will collapse when the total mass/energy trying to traverse them is above zero.

There are ways to stabilise a wormhole. One is to use negative energy (we've not found a suitable form of this, but that doesn't mean there isn't one). There's supposedly another recently-discovered way that generates the same effect but doesn't require the actual use of negative energy.

Provided that BOTH the conjecture AND one of the postulated ways of stabilising a wormhole are correct, THEN (and only then) is it possible to use FTL communications links.

For slower-than-light communication, there's some reason for thinking optical communication might be better than radio, but Optical SETI (which is a thing) is not really being pursued at the moment.

Re:

[JanSand]

Obviously you have a better grasp than me of theoretical possibilities. I keep in mind of Vonnegut's "Sirens Of Titan" where much of human evolution involved the transfer of a greeting message of an alien robot just saying "Hello". Or Le Guin's ansible.

Re:

[hesiod]

It's oddly coincidental that I just finished reading that again a couple days ago. The goal was to create a single replacement part for a stranded alien's space ship, but I find both similarly amusing..

Re:

[JanSand]

Considering that Egyptian hieroglyphics were a total mystery until the Rosetta Stone was discovered, the much tougher problems of dealing with a total alien intellect may be beyond anything we could attempt. Considering our problem of dealing with the deaths of the Kennedy brothers and what really happened at 9/11, or whether Jesus might have been a talented dolphin, understanding extraterrestrials may be beyond our capabilities.

Re:

[jd]

The only way we'd be able to understand would be the way Carl Sagan proposed - a mathematical treatise that defined everything from first principles in thorough detail because we'd be able to spot recurring patterns and structure (the approach that British mathematicians applied to Hieroglyphics that gave Champollion the necessary information for his breakthrough). It wouldn't allow them to transmit literature or fine art. Music would work, though. Physics would be possible only if this is immutable (someth

Re:

[JanSand]

Math, of course, is the ultimate in pattern abstraction and perhaps there is a universality that would resolve vast differences, but I am afflicted with a huge uneasiness in mathematics, a personal defect that limits my appreciation of its generalities, I suspect that math is more human than people presume but my limitations in the area are very personal and probably in error.

Re: Headline Misleading

[oldnuskeet]

Wouldnâ(TM)t you need to take one part of the entangled pair to the place you want to comunÃcate with first? You would need a first travel to stablish the link and that would still require thousands of years.

Re:

[jd]

Well, if you were doing all-to-all, yes.

Let's say you have advanced 10 civilizations, such that there exists a planet that two can both reach (even if uninhabited) and that there are enough such planets that you form a single network. Every planet reachable by one of those civilizations can now communicate with every other reachable planet of any of those civilizations. Provided any differing protocols can be translated by any of the ten, this would be workable.

We'd only need to travel 4.1 light years, and

Re:

[Brain-Fu]

The intergalactic community communicates via ansible [wikipedia.org].

Re:

[JanSand]

Apple still refuses to admit its ansible may hit the market in a year or two.

Re:

[morgauxo]

Does it HAVE to be a 2-way conversation?

What if...

FTL and practical interstellar travel just aren't a thing that our universe's physics allows for.

Sad as that might be it would also mean that there is nothing to lose by giving information to the neighbors. Imagine if societies reach a point of scientific development and realize that the universe is full of civilizations AND there is no way to visit (or conquer).

They might just start broadcasting all the science and technology they know and listening for oth

Re:

[JanSand]

And perhaps life here on Earth is in its early stages to attain this universality. Some civilizations may attain this universality and some simply fail. Current Earth life is so averse to unifying that it may be one of the failures. But there is time enough to keep trying. Every living human is full of other life forms and some of us attain unity and some don't.

Re:

[eriks]

Just spitballing here, but:

What if the "Great Filter" is simply the lack of the ability to think (and plan) on multi-generational time-frames? If an advanced technological civilization can plan a 1000+ year mission to a nearby star (with a generation ship: maybe a hollowed-out asteroid accelerated to ~.1c) that could be the basis for a galactic civilization -- the time-frames for contact and communication would be on the order of millennia, but if one has the infrastructure, and can operate at very-long ti

Re:

[JanSand]

There is a possibility that intellect itself may be a form of life that attains self consciousness and uses individual living creatures that it consciously modifies to attain its goals. Just as a human body has different organs to perform its basic functions, maybe there is a form of life such as the proposed Gaia that can create necessary variations that can be different to adapt to the ecological differences on each planet or even interstellar space, yet retain a unified self that remains intellectually u

Re:

[eriks]

That's a definite possibility! At least to my mind. It may have already happened (we're not in a "simulation", but there is some kind of "intelligent design" in a non-religious sense). In any event, it seems like all life is "connected" but maybe it goes deeper than just biological life. Maybe the "seed" of all life is the hydrogen nucleus, and that life is an inevitability wherever there's sufficient chemical diversity (stellar life, death and rebirth) and energy inputs (proximity to a star). The only

Re:

[JanSand]

There seems to me, as you say, a coordination of many systems within each of us that extends the possibility of resolution of conflicts between various life forms with the possibility of joins into a totality that might even extend to interstellarity. Just as an excess of one form opens the possibility for predator creations to resolve differences. Here on Earth humanity has conquered most opposing large predators so viruses and other minor forms are given the opportunities to restore balances. Although it

Re:

[Eunomion]

It's not clear from the text whether they found a sun-like star amid many stars that could have been the origin, or if they found the origin and it happened to be a sun-like star. The latter would obviously be much more eyebrow-raising. But even in the case of the former, it would be interesting to know how unlikely it would be to find such a star within the parameters of the search once you account for search biases.

Re:

[UnknowingFool]

Reading the summary, it seems they have found the most likely location of the signal. They have not conclusively determined the nature of the signal. In the area of the location is a sun-like star as opposed to other types of stars which which would be less conducive to life as we know it.

Re:

[Eunomion]

That's also my reading, but I'm cautious because it's too easy to pick an interpretation that would be more interesting. If they indeed made a blind analysis and found that the origin was a star that is very similar to the Sun, that would be highly interesting.

Which is not to say that we know which stars are best for life or intelligence, but we know with 100% certainty that stars like the Sun can sustain life and intelligence, so that would be a cool finding. Hopefully some of the next generation of t

Re:

[ceoyoyo]

It's radio, which is not super directional. The Big Ear seems to have had an angular resolution of about 0.12 x 0.58 degrees, which is not a lot smaller than the full moon. That's a lot of stars.

Has every earth signal been ruled out?

[Viol8]

After all, the military were testing some top secret project which perhaps went wrong they're hardly going to say so.

Re:

[Zocalo]

Been a while since I read anything on this, but I think there was enough data to rule out local sources due to the relative motions of the Earth (which is responsible for the 72-second length of the signal; it's the maximum amount of time the system could observe any particular point in space) and local sources. There have also been multiple instances of military satellites and stealthy aircraft being picked up by radio telescopes, and there are several characteristics of those that can be used to either c

Re:Has every earth signal been ruled out?

[Viol8]

Fair enough ,but the killer line in the wonkypedia article about it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal) for me is this:

"The significantly more sensitive Very Large Array did not detect the signal, and the probability that a signal below the detection threshold of the Very Large Array could be detected by the Big Ear due to interstellar scintillation is low"

Which if correct says to me it was of earthbound origin.

Re:

[Narcocide]

Yea, didn't they already debunk this one by tracing it to a microwave in the break room?

Re:

[Anonymouse Cowtard]

try this [theguardian.com].

Re:

[jythie]

All that really means is that the signal is not recurring, so there does not appear to be any constant or repeating source in that region.

Re:

[Viol8]

To me the wording implies the VLA was listening at the same time to the same section of sky.

Re:Has every earth signal been ruled out?

[jd]

It wouldn't be from a military project. The SETI Institute, in 1999, were fairly confident that it was a signal being reflected off a cloud of microscopic fragments of space junk, that such fragments far enough out (say, from the Apollo 13 incident) would look non-local over such a short time.

Thing about it is it was just a radio burst

[jfdavis668]

No modulation, no kind of information included. If someone was trying to send us a message, they did a really poor job of it.

Re:Thing about it is it was just a radio burst

[Dan East]

No modulation, no kind of information included.

We don't know that. The equipment used basically only detected signal strength within 10 kHz bands, at a very slow sampling rate of once every several seconds. They know this signal fell entirely within one of those bands, so it was quite narrow - 10 kHz at most, and probably much narrower because the odds of it being 10 kHz and exactly fitting into the bandwidth of that filter is extremely unlikely.

The polling frequency of the receiving equipment was so low that it would require amplitude modulation with a period of 10 seconds or slower in order to be detected. That would be extremely, extremely slow modulation, especially given the carrier frequency of 1.42 GHz.

It was also not capable of detecting any other advanced modulations at all, such as FM modulation (unless it was so wide it crossed multiple 10 kHz bandwidths), phase modulation, or even any kind of fast digital or AM modulation. The signal could have been digital and pulsing at an extremely high frequency, and all the equipment could detect is the average intensity.

The purpose of that system was to detect spikes of intense radio waves across a very wide spectrum and area of space. Then more sensitive and discerning equipment would be trained at that area of the sky to work out the details. However the signal never reappeared.

Question about the "one horn" bit

[Maury Markowitz]

Looking at images I can find online, it seems that Big Ear had two feeds, each consisting of two horns. The paired horns are above each other, which I assume is done to make the vertical angle small, so that it roughly matches the vertical angle of the reflector. But I do not understand how the two sets are connected, if they are. Are they completely separate receivers? Are they fed together to reduce the horizontal angle?

Assuming they are completely separate for the moment, which would match with some tidb

"FUUUUCK"

[mveloso]

- Alien radio transmission.

just hype

[rommysunny]

now a days, it is very common to talk about alien, if NASA really knows the reality than why don't they bring it into public domain? what are the afraid of? Much better option is go to fishing [fishingmar...neyard.com] as read such hyped news..