45 years have passed since ‘Wow’, the most enigmatic extraterrestrial signal

Aug. 16 () –

The story behind the famous alien signal known for the exclamation ‘Wow!’ has a mysterious quality has inspired countless alien encounters in science fiction.

However, its authenticity as coming from an ‘extraterrestrial intelligence’ has been questioned since that night on August 15, 1977 –45 years ago now– at 03:16 UTC, when the astronomer jerry ehman used the large radio telescope at Ohio State University to sweep the skies for signals that might have originated from an extraterrestrial civilization.

That night, Ehman found something. And ever since that night, astronomers have been trying to figure out what it means. Pointing in the direction of three star systems called Chi Sagittarii, in the constellation of Sagittarius, the radio telescope detected a 72-second burst of radio waves, a signal much stronger than background noise. On the observatory’s computer printout, Ehman annotated the record of the explosion with the notation ‘Wow!’

This enthusiasm was not an exaggeration, it was the kind of signal he was looking for, the kind of signal astronomers believe a technologically capable extraterrestrial civilization would produce.

The print of ‘Big Ear’, the nickname for the Ohio State University radio telescope, contains a bunch of seemingly random numbers and letters, but Ehman outlined a cluster of digits “6EQUJ5” with other circles around it with a red pen. to a “6” and “7” in separate columns. This particular code first uses the numbers 1-9 and then the alphabet from AZ to denote signal strength. As the burst suggests, the signal strength reached “6” and then burst through the letters reaching a peak of “U” before returning back up the numerical scale to “5.” There was then a slight ripple out of the main signal (circled “6” and “7”).

However, since that day in 1977, a detection of a signal from that fortress has not been repeated. Even after the SETI Institute was founded in 1984, and countless efforts were made to find another similar radio signal burst, astronomers have been faced with silence in the cosmos; a problem that has only served to intensify the discomfort of the Fermi Paradox.

Skeptical that the signal originated from some distant advanced civilization, Ehman himself recently stated that it might be related to a mysterious FRB burst (Fast Radio Burst). Astronomer Antonio Paris, from the St. Petersburg College in Florida, maintains that the origin of the signal could be an uncatalogued comet.