I was promised aliens! 😭. (Had to add the period to hit 25 characters)
OGMansaMusa on
Wow!
Too soon? 🤪
One more thing originally thought to be alien or God, turns out to be natural. Whoddathunkit?
Master_Engineering_9 on
Wouldn’t aliens at this point also be a rare cosmic event 😩
peterabbit456 on
The Wow signal is
> For 1 minute, 12 seconds that night, Big Ear recorded radio waves from near the constellation Sagittarius that were 30 times stronger than the background hum of deep space and were transmitted in a remarkably specific frequency of 1,420 megahertz. Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, naturally emits radio waves at this frequency …
The 1420 MHz frequency can be used to argue for a natural, or an intelligent source for the Wow signal.
> However, nothing like the Wow! signal has ever been detected again, and no known natural phenomenon has been able to convincingly explain it — perhaps until now.
The new, natural explanation is more convincing than aliens, but it is highly speculative.
> the bizarre Wow! signal may actually be a fortuitous detection of an extremely intense flare striking an interstellar cloud of hydrogen gas. A dense, magnetic star known as a magnetar would be the only source capable of emitting such a strong flare, …
> … Méndez and his colleagues arrived at the new hypothesis after they unexpectedly discovered eight Wow!-like signals while scouting through archival data from the now-defunct Arecibo Observatory.
The signals they found were < 100 times weaker than the Wow signal. So many similar signals from different parts of the sky points to natural origins.
> The narrowband trait of the Wow! signal suggests humankind’s radio interference is the more likely explanation, Yvette Cendes, a radio astronomer at the University of Oregon who was not involved with the new study, told Scientific American.
It is part of the nature of science that some questions are not immediately and obviously settled. We still don’t know what caused the Wow signal. More research needs to be done to confirm that there are other examples of this type of signal. More research needs to be done into the theoretical mechanism of generating the signal.
magnaton117 on
Maybe it’s the aliens’ way of saying
***”YOU EXIST BECAUSE WE ALLOW IT.***
***YOU WILL END BECAUSE WE DEMAND IT.”***
No_Aesthetic on
This information is very impressive indeed but I’m not really sold one way or another. The incredibly unique strength of Wow! is one aspect. I do think this is probably the most likely natural explanation so far, but we need a lot more evidence before declaring it to be the one.
Interrobang22 on
I thought it was a nearby microwave oven being open too quickly?
Andromeda321 on
Radio astronomer here! I read this over a few weeks ago for another journalist (and discovered one of my PhD students is second author- hah!). My conclusion is it’s a fun idea, but needs a *lot* more work than what is in this paper to be a viable explanation- they’re pretty light on details, and it’s a preprint, so if I were the referee I would definitely have a bit more I would need to see before it’s accepted.
Some background- the [Wow! signal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal) is the most infamous potential SETI signal ever, dating to the 1970s by a telescope in Ohio that no longer exists. It was a “drift telescope” that basically just looked straight up at whatever was passing overhead with the Earth’s rotation, and was set to monitor all night, and that morning the astronomer who went in saw a signal had been recorded effectively like what a signal from aliens should look like, and wrote “Wow!” in the margins. First, it was narrow in bandwidth- astronomical signals are very much *not* narrow band, but artificial ones are for efficiency- and second it was right at a frequency thought to be good for if you want to get interstellar attention. BUT despite a LOT of looking, the signal was never seen again- and if you want to understand what a thing is, that’s a real problem when you only have one example. (Also- it’s probably still most likely just a weird bit of manmade interference, but what’s the fun in that?)
So, bring on this result! Basically, this team took Arecibo before it collapsed to do a search similar to the Wow! signal one (fun fact, it was also a drift telescope), and found signals similar but fainter than the Wow! signal ones. As in also narrow band but at that frequency, but not easily detectable. So, that is cool because it’s the first time anyone has found narrow band signals like this from space! The paper proposes a version of [interstellar scintillation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_scintillation) as a mechanism for how this happens- imagine you have a background source like a magnetar, and a hydrogen cloud aligns *just* right for a moment, boosting and amplifying the signal. We know scintillation happens and does weird things- I’ve seen it in my sources, and people study it for a lifetime- and people suspected the Wow signal could be due to similar for some time now. So it’s not implausible- the trouble is the paper 100% falls short of *any* explanation of the theoretical mechanism behind how this might happen to create such an unusual signal. That is a rather big gap, to put it mildly, that needs to be explained.
But I guess the take home message here is it turns out hydrogen clouds can give off narrow band signals briefly if things are aligned just right. If this holds up, it’s pretty unexpected but exciting because we should be able to find more of them with other telescopes. Unfortunately this sort of emission would also rely on things being precisely aligned for a brief moment, so in that case we are probably never seeing the original line up of the Wow! signal again. The next steps would be finding more of these with another telescope (RIP Arecibo) and figuring out if a mechanism is possible with this explanation or not.
8 Comments
I was promised aliens! 😭. (Had to add the period to hit 25 characters)
Wow!
Too soon? 🤪
One more thing originally thought to be alien or God, turns out to be natural. Whoddathunkit?
Wouldn’t aliens at this point also be a rare cosmic event 😩
The Wow signal is
> For 1 minute, 12 seconds that night, Big Ear recorded radio waves from near the constellation Sagittarius that were 30 times stronger than the background hum of deep space and were transmitted in a remarkably specific frequency of 1,420 megahertz. Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, naturally emits radio waves at this frequency …
The 1420 MHz frequency can be used to argue for a natural, or an intelligent source for the Wow signal.
> However, nothing like the Wow! signal has ever been detected again, and no known natural phenomenon has been able to convincingly explain it — perhaps until now.
The new, natural explanation is more convincing than aliens, but it is highly speculative.
> the bizarre Wow! signal may actually be a fortuitous detection of an extremely intense flare striking an interstellar cloud of hydrogen gas. A dense, magnetic star known as a magnetar would be the only source capable of emitting such a strong flare, …
> … Méndez and his colleagues arrived at the new hypothesis after they unexpectedly discovered eight Wow!-like signals while scouting through archival data from the now-defunct Arecibo Observatory.
The signals they found were < 100 times weaker than the Wow signal. So many similar signals from different parts of the sky points to natural origins.
> The narrowband trait of the Wow! signal suggests humankind’s radio interference is the more likely explanation, Yvette Cendes, a radio astronomer at the University of Oregon who was not involved with the new study, told Scientific American.
It is part of the nature of science that some questions are not immediately and obviously settled. We still don’t know what caused the Wow signal. More research needs to be done to confirm that there are other examples of this type of signal. More research needs to be done into the theoretical mechanism of generating the signal.
Maybe it’s the aliens’ way of saying
***”YOU EXIST BECAUSE WE ALLOW IT.***
***YOU WILL END BECAUSE WE DEMAND IT.”***
This information is very impressive indeed but I’m not really sold one way or another. The incredibly unique strength of Wow! is one aspect. I do think this is probably the most likely natural explanation so far, but we need a lot more evidence before declaring it to be the one.
I thought it was a nearby microwave oven being open too quickly?
Radio astronomer here! I read this over a few weeks ago for another journalist (and discovered one of my PhD students is second author- hah!). My conclusion is it’s a fun idea, but needs a *lot* more work than what is in this paper to be a viable explanation- they’re pretty light on details, and it’s a preprint, so if I were the referee I would definitely have a bit more I would need to see before it’s accepted.
Some background- the [Wow! signal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal) is the most infamous potential SETI signal ever, dating to the 1970s by a telescope in Ohio that no longer exists. It was a “drift telescope” that basically just looked straight up at whatever was passing overhead with the Earth’s rotation, and was set to monitor all night, and that morning the astronomer who went in saw a signal had been recorded effectively like what a signal from aliens should look like, and wrote “Wow!” in the margins. First, it was narrow in bandwidth- astronomical signals are very much *not* narrow band, but artificial ones are for efficiency- and second it was right at a frequency thought to be good for if you want to get interstellar attention. BUT despite a LOT of looking, the signal was never seen again- and if you want to understand what a thing is, that’s a real problem when you only have one example. (Also- it’s probably still most likely just a weird bit of manmade interference, but what’s the fun in that?)
So, bring on this result! Basically, this team took Arecibo before it collapsed to do a search similar to the Wow! signal one (fun fact, it was also a drift telescope), and found signals similar but fainter than the Wow! signal ones. As in also narrow band but at that frequency, but not easily detectable. So, that is cool because it’s the first time anyone has found narrow band signals like this from space! The paper proposes a version of [interstellar scintillation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_scintillation) as a mechanism for how this happens- imagine you have a background source like a magnetar, and a hydrogen cloud aligns *just* right for a moment, boosting and amplifying the signal. We know scintillation happens and does weird things- I’ve seen it in my sources, and people study it for a lifetime- and people suspected the Wow signal could be due to similar for some time now. So it’s not implausible- the trouble is the paper 100% falls short of *any* explanation of the theoretical mechanism behind how this might happen to create such an unusual signal. That is a rather big gap, to put it mildly, that needs to be explained.
But I guess the take home message here is it turns out hydrogen clouds can give off narrow band signals briefly if things are aligned just right. If this holds up, it’s pretty unexpected but exciting because we should be able to find more of them with other telescopes. Unfortunately this sort of emission would also rely on things being precisely aligned for a brief moment, so in that case we are probably never seeing the original line up of the Wow! signal again. The next steps would be finding more of these with another telescope (RIP Arecibo) and figuring out if a mechanism is possible with this explanation or not.