I had a theory that it was someone walking across the field with an electronic device, like a flashlight. So I looked up the duration of the signal, size of the field, and average walking pace. It matched perfectly.
There's a story of a famous observatory that, iirc, kept on seeing really powerful intermittent signals that they couldn't quite hone in on. It seemed everytime they tried to zoom in on the source they couldn't find it again. Signal was quite elusive.
They finally traced it to people using the microwave in the break room in a very specific way. Some people liked to open the microwave door before the timer went off. The microwave stopped, of course, but there was a split second where it was still emitting while the protective cage was opened, and the energy that leaked out during those couple of ms were enough to screw with the observatory equipment.
Aliens? Nope, just some tired grad student reheating their coffee.
Believe me, I'm as angry about this as you will be, but TIL that the correct term is "to home in," which makes sense, but nowhere near as pleasing, or visual, as "hone in."
I did some undergrad research on the [ADMX][1] experiment, which is searching for a theoretical particle by listening for its interaction with a microwave photon in a big, ultra-cold cylinder that can be tuned to different frequencies.
A while back, they thought that they might have found something at 700 MHz. Then went looking again and it was gone. My professor said that it was probably a CPU in the lab.
It would have to be a very specific kind of device. The "Wow!" signal isn't broad-spectrum noise. It's one specific frequency, and it just happens to be a frequency near one we expect to be used as a signal.
Somebody could well have been walking across a field with a 1450 MHz generator. I don't know why; maybe it was a prototype of a portable microwave-oven/Walkman mashup. If so, it was leaky, and perhaps that's why it never caught on.
> it just happens to be a frequency near one we expect to be used as a signal.
What's the reasoning for this? I've seen noted that the Wow signal of 1420 MHz is near the hydrogen line frequency, and is commonly detected astrophysically.
So is the reasoning just that, if you want to send a signal, then you might choose this frequency because other civilizations will probably have detectors tuned to it?
But then the flip-side of that is that if you detect this frequency, then it's almost certainly natural origin, from the excitation of hydrogen.
It was after watching a documentary called "WOW Signal". The receiver they built was along the edge of a field, and it's designed to pick up extremely weak variations in electrical signals/radio waves. They go into great detail about how sensitive it is. The signal itself looks like a parabola when graphed, gaining in intensity and then falling off at the same rate. Exactly what you'd expect from someone walking across the field in front of it. And if I remember correctly, the signal was more about how much it differed from what was expected, not necessarily how intense it was. My thinking is that if it can pick up on the variations in signal from a star system light-years away, it would also indicate on a Timex watch (or flashlight) a dozen meters away.
I pasted the URL into firefox, and didn't see that huge "you're using an adblocker popup".
I opened a firefox private window and navigated to it from the HN page, and got the adblocker popup.
Right now I have two tabs open in the same non-private window, one showing the adblocker popup and one not. In the one that's not I can view the whole page. Reloading in the one that is not showing the adblocker popup then showed it.
I navigated from HN in a non-private window and got the popup. So this seems to be referer constrained in some sense, not necessarily browser based. Hard to confirm.
There is a theory that if we could find the same janitor and get them to plug the same broken vacuum cleaner to the same socket in exactly the same way, mankind's energy problem will be forever solved, one way or the other.
There is another theory that this has already happened.
Simple programmer here. I have a dumb question. What about the "Wow!" signal is special, or unique? What makes someone see it and think "wow"? Is there some kind of information encoded in the signal?
The signal's frequency is extremely narrowband and matches the natural emission frequency of hydrogen atoms. This is the most likely frequency one might choose if aiming to have an unknown recipient guess and listen in. The signal's recorded intensity followed a bell curve typical of a fixed celestial source, because as the Earth rotated, the telescope's stationary beam swept across the signal's point of origin.
There is no information in it, it looks like a continuous wave of radio energy coming from space. It is on a frequency that might be a natural one for any intelligent civilization to consider broadcasting on, and it is a narrowband signal, meaning it only covers a small range of frequencies.
The claim is that humans would have to monitor for six millennia to detect a signal like this as a result of random interference/noise. The implication is that the signal is probably real, since humans have been monitoring for much less than 6000 years.
I used to think the Wow signal was just an overhyped story from the past. But after looking into the technical details, I realized it was genuinely unusual. The signal was clean and narrow-band, nothing like ordinary noise. Decades later, people are still going through old data to study it. What really stays with me is not the search for aliens, but the quiet persistence behind it. Our curiosity about the universe doesn't fade so easily.
You need to rule out that you accidentally picked up some radio broadcast and state that otherwise anyone worth their salt will first ask, "Are you sure it didn't come from the local radio station?"
Yes, various terrestrial sources have been proposed for this signal over the years, primarily because of its strength.
To have an extraterrestrial origin, and still be so anomalously strong at the point of reception, it must have been so strong at the source that it didn’t fit any known cosmic process. Given the inverse square law, the easiest explanation for the unusual strength was simply that it was unusually close. But this work seems to rule that out and also propose a process to create such a strong signal.
No, it’s not:
> "Our study did not conclude that the Wow! Signal constituted evidence of a signal emanating from an extraterrestrial civilization. However, null results are instrumental in refining future technosignature searches," the team concludes.
We won't. while we don't know for sure if there is life there is nothing close enough to contact. The closest star is 4 light years, anything within 20 light years has been studied and has no signs of radio or other communication. Anything more than 20 light years is a 40 year message round trip - too far to establish contact in your likely lifetime. (If you are very young maybe 30 light years - but that doesn't add much)
They can't be chill and like us at the same time.
Chilled aliens most likely don't invent faster than light travel so I pretty much hope aliens won't find us or are not interested in us.
It's far more likely we will discover aliens and then there will be nothing either of us can do about it, especially them since what we discover will be long dead.
Any species that is advanced enough for interstellar communication will almost certainly be a highly aggressive apex species. You don't get to the top of the food chain by being nice, you get there by murdering all of the competition and plundering all of the resources. And if you were trying to be nice, someone else would have just wiped you out.
The big question is if a species can eventually reach some point of collective enlightenment where they leave these primitive impulses behind. But based on the current state of humanity, I'm not to optimistic.
I think we're expecting too much, afaik to detect anything we'd need aliens to be deliberately signaling us(tv, radio it's alien equivalent isn't going to be strong enough ). Or sending out a much much more powerful signal in all directions.
And it has to repeat.
We're expecting aliens to be very committed to doing something we don't do ourselves. We have deliberately sent out powerful signals with things like the Arecibo message but not repeating. And it would have to be repeating for a very long time.
To add, with the rules SETI currently uses nobody would have heard of it as they wouldn't consider a non-repeating signal like it as worth shouting about.
Space aliens are still kinda the best explanation. It's extremely inconclusive, and it's entirely possible that we'll discover some new natural phenomenon to explain it instead, but for now there's not really any known alternative.
Readit News
They finally traced it to people using the microwave in the break room in a very specific way. Some people liked to open the microwave door before the timer went off. The microwave stopped, of course, but there was a split second where it was still emitting while the protective cage was opened, and the energy that leaked out during those couple of ms were enough to screw with the observatory equipment.
Aliens? Nope, just some tired grad student reheating their coffee.
Press `STOP` first, got it.
A while back, they thought that they might have found something at 700 MHz. Then went looking again and it was gone. My professor said that it was probably a CPU in the lab.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axion_Dark_Matter_Experiment
Somebody could well have been walking across a field with a 1450 MHz generator. I don't know why; maybe it was a prototype of a portable microwave-oven/Walkman mashup. If so, it was leaky, and perhaps that's why it never caught on.
What's the reasoning for this? I've seen noted that the Wow signal of 1420 MHz is near the hydrogen line frequency, and is commonly detected astrophysically.
So is the reasoning just that, if you want to send a signal, then you might choose this frequency because other civilizations will probably have detectors tuned to it?
But then the flip-side of that is that if you detect this frequency, then it's almost certainly natural origin, from the excitation of hydrogen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal#Time_variation
They probably were mostly operating around 30 mhz in the CB band or 120-150 in the Ham or aircraft bands in that era, but harmonics are a thing
I opened a firefox private window and navigated to it from the HN page, and got the adblocker popup.
Right now I have two tabs open in the same non-private window, one showing the adblocker popup and one not. In the one that's not I can view the whole page. Reloading in the one that is not showing the adblocker popup then showed it.
I navigated from HN in a non-private window and got the popup. So this seems to be referer constrained in some sense, not necessarily browser based. Hard to confirm.
May be an a-b test?
Dead Comment
There is another theory that this has already happened.
We actually don't know that. There might or might not have been some information in it; we did not capture or retain enough to be sure either way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal#Intensity
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Until there is a second one, there is nothing to statistically distinguish this from random noise.
You need to rule out that you accidentally picked up some radio broadcast and state that otherwise anyone worth their salt will first ask, "Are you sure it didn't come from the local radio station?"
To have an extraterrestrial origin, and still be so anomalously strong at the point of reception, it must have been so strong at the source that it didn’t fit any known cosmic process. Given the inverse square law, the easiest explanation for the unusual strength was simply that it was unusually close. But this work seems to rule that out and also propose a process to create such a strong signal.
What did you have for lunch? I heated up my leftovers in the microwave oven in the office.
:)
The big question is if a species can eventually reach some point of collective enlightenment where they leave these primitive impulses behind. But based on the current state of humanity, I'm not to optimistic.
And it has to repeat.
We're expecting aliens to be very committed to doing something we don't do ourselves. We have deliberately sent out powerful signals with things like the Arecibo message but not repeating. And it would have to be repeating for a very long time.
To add, with the rules SETI currently uses nobody would have heard of it as they wouldn't consider a non-repeating signal like it as worth shouting about.
Dead Comment
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/wow-signal-...
The research in the article does suggest a plausible alternative
There are many, many cosmic processes that we don't know the first thing about.
At one point, we didn't know what a pulsar was, and a fair amount of people probably thought it was an alien signal.
Human History is littered with examples of attribution of the unexplained to aliens.
So far, non alien explanations have been found for all of them, except possibly this one.
Does it warrant further study? Absolutely. Is it likely to be aliens? Statistically, no.
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