The Mysterious ‘Wow!’ Signal Seems Solved After 50 Years

On 15th August 1977, the Big Ear radio observatory at Ohio State University noticed an intense transmission. It lasted over 72 seconds and was seen on a very specific frequency. The scientists noted that it didn’t look like it was a natural phenomenon and had the signatures of an artificial source. Now astronomers may have finally solved the mystery of WOW! signal and it took nearly 50 years.

The Mystery of the Wow! Signal May Be Finally Solved

Would we potentially have seen something reaching out that night? The event was called the Wow! signal after the note that was left by a SETI researcher (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) on a printout of the data. Nothing has been detected since that carries the same characteristics, but now, almost 50 years on, we could have an explanation. 

Professor Abel Méndez has now speculated that the signal was likely caused by a rare astrophysical event. Scientists explained that “as a fun project, we analysed our Arecibo Telescope data using the same methods and format employed by the Big Ear Radio Telescope in 1977.”

Their insights suggest that the signal may have been created when a flare from a hyper-magnetised, hyperdense star called a magnetar came into contact with a cloud of hydrogen gas and potentially caused an incandescence in the cloud which was short-lived but created an outburst that could be measured in this way.

A glitch or a rare signal?

Some people have called this a failure of equipment or put things down to an instrumental glitch, but Abel Méndez has always believed that it was more than this, and is basing the analysis on similar data found at the Arecibo Observatory. This showed some signals that had a similar look to the Wow! signal. 

“I would say, wow—I never thought of that. I never thought of the ‘Wow!’ signal as being real and being produced by some weird astrophysical phenomenon,” Méndez says. His passion to find out what was really going on meant the unearthing of signals from the Arecibo archive.

The Wow! signal was right in the 1,420 MHz sweet spot and 30x more intense than background noise. The records showed that it came from near the M55 cluster of stars and with just 70 seconds of signal for us to analyse, 

Jason Wright from Pennsylvania State University also provided an outlook on the signal: “It’s very common to get one-off signals that one can’t completely explain.” He also explained that anomalies often show hints that it could be an anomaly or equipment error.

Still a lot of work ahead

Méndez and the team trawled through the data and managed to find “signals that were very similar to what the Wow! signal looked like,” researcher Kevin Ceballos says, which were also detected at around the 1,420 MHz frequency. The signals had 50-100 times less intensity than the Wow! Signal, but did share some familiar properties.

Though the findings are certainly interesting, there has been a little scepticism in the industry. “I like this creativity,” said Michael Garrett from the International Academy of Astronautics’s SETI Permanent Committee but he did throw some doubt over things: “It feels a bit contrived to me. Several improbable things needed to happen all at once: Big Ear just happened to have been looking at the exact snapshot of sky in which a magnetar flare smashed into a hydrogen cloud. And a hydrogen maser at that exact narrowband frequency—a celestial event which has otherwise never been observed before—was serendipitously produced so that Big Ear could detect it.”

So, there’s still some mystery surrounding the signal, but it is possible that the work done by Méndez could be important in gaining a better understanding of this.