![]() With $100 million in private funding, Breakthrough Listen is studying radio waves from our galaxy one million of the nearest stars and 100 of the closest galaxies for signs of alien life. “It exists as the lure of what might be aliens.”Īnd though the Big Ear was disassembled in the late 90s, the search for life beyond our planet hasn’t diminished.īreakthrough Listen, part of the Breakthrough Initiatives founded by Yuri Milner, Mark Zuckerburg and the late Stephen Hawking, continues comprehensive SETI research. “Nothing as far as understanding what it is or where it came from has ever really been discovered,” Gallagher said. Its abrupt materialization and swift disappearance have added to its peculiarity, and as such, it is difficult to study. … So, it sticks around in popular culture and in the scientific mind because it hasn’t been explained.”Īfter the Wow! signal was detected, scientists scoured the skies with radio telescopes significantly more sensitive than the Big Ear to try and locate it again, but nothing was found. There weren’t any planets in that area at the time there were not any known asteroids in that area that could have reflected light. “Over the years, people have considered different theories,” Gallagher said. The Wow! signal occurred at almost exactly this expected frequency and was about 30 times more intense than the surrounding noise level. To this day, the Wow! signal remains the strongest candidate for an alien radio transmission ever detected.įor one, researchers have long hypothesized that aliens would choose to communicate at a frequency near that emitted by hydrogen, since hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, said Molly Gallagher, a graduate research associate in the Department of Astronomy. ![]() Volunteer astronomer Jerry Ehman, surprised by the numbers he saw on a computer readout detailing the intensity of the signal, wrote “Wow!” next to the finding, coining its name. 15, 1977, the Big Ear picked up an inexplicably mysterious signal originating near the Sagittarius constellation. The 22-year search is the longest-running Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project in history. The Wow! signal was detected by Ohio State’s Radio Observatory (known as the “Big Ear” telescope), which surveyed the sky between 1973-95 for alien radio signals. ![]() Though the pursuit of aliens has largely come up empty, one strange discovery recorded by an Ohio State astronomer in 1977 continues to baffle scientists and stoke imaginations that maybe we aren’t alone in the universe: the “Wow! signal.” Humans have long scanned the vastness of space in search of intelligent extraterrestrial life.
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