You might see it if you’re really, really lucky.Īnyway, “Hello? Hello? Anybody out there?” So if in all the galaxy, there are x many civilizations which each have 10,000 years of “airtime”, in the stellar timeframe, that’s like looking for a flashbulb, even if x is a large number.
#WOW SIGNAL FREE#
(Feel free to substitute other values if you like they’re made up anyway, like 97.3% of all statistics. (And I feel that 10,000 years is really quite optimistic.) So the probablility that anyone who detects the signal does so after we’re gone is 99.9%. The question becomes, How long can a civilization sufficiently advanced to generate radio signals continue to survive? If it’s, say, 10,000 years, that signal will have only covered 10% of the distance or 0.1% of the volume of space in which it would be detectable. So these signals have thus far only propagated to a interstellar sphere of about 60 light years’ radius, 99,940 light years to go. (Apparently, broadcast radio is much weaker and less detectable.) He also said that we would be able to detect similar signals at around 100,000 light years distance. My old astronomy professor pointed out that we’ve been continuously sending clear radio signals to any surrounding civilizations since about 1948, in the form of defense radar systems. However their findings did essentially disprove the only working theory as to the cause of the original event: “interstellar scintillation.” It was thought that perhaps some weaker radio signal from space had been temporarily focused on the Big Ear in a way similar to stars twinkling… but the VLA is sensitive enough that it would have detected such a source, and it did not.
#WOW SIGNAL PATCH#
They detected some extremely faint sources of radio emissions in the infamous patch of sky, but nothing like that of the “Wow!” signal. They managed to obtain some time on the META array at the Oak Ridge Observatory in Massachusetts, and the extremely sensitive Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, which is made up of twenty-seven 25-meter radio dishes. Marvel arranged for further scans of that region of space.
Several times over the next twenty years, longtime SETI researcher Robert Gray and his colleague Kevin B. Planning to return to that patch of sky periodically, the Big Ear continued its broader purpose. Nothing interesting was observed during those thirty days, yet scientists were at a loss for an explanation of the original event.
#WOW SIGNAL FULL#
The observatory researchers trained their massive scope on that part of the sky for a full month, watching closely for a repeat of the mysterious signal. This indicated either the unlikely possibility that the first beam had detected something that wasn’t there, or that the source of the signal had been shut off or redirected in the intervening time. When the second detector covered the same patch of sky three minutes later, it heard nothing. But was it sent by an advanced civilization?Ĭuriously, the signal was picked up by only one of the scope’s two detectors. He did some analysis of the data, and by all indications this powerful, narrowband radio signal was from outside of our solar system. Seventy-two seconds also happened to be the exact length of time it would take for the Earth to rotate the Big Ear through a signal from space. The volunteer who found and circled the data in the paper printout was Jerry Ehman, who was amazed at the signal’s intensity and what a narrow range of frequencies it appeared in. The signal came from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, and lasted seventy-two seconds at about 1420.456 MHz before it faded away. It was powerful enough to push the Big Ear’s monitoring device off the charts. The radio telescope was observing space as part of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program, and it was the most compelling signal the receiver had recorded in its fourteen years of operation. The volunteer who spotted the pattern on the paper logs circled the data and wrote “Wow!” in the margin. On August 15th, 1977, such a signal was received at the Big Ear radio observatory in Ohio, though the ensuing drama was considerably more subdued. At some point someone yells, “Get me the President!” at the person whose job it is to get presidents. “We’re getting a signal!” he shouts into a phone as needles dance across paper chart recorders, and scientists rapidly converge on the scene.
It’s no rare occurrence in science fiction: The introverted researcher working the graveyard shift at a SETI radio observatory jumps out of his seat in surprise when the red light blinks on the control panel. Please do not distribute without written permission from Damn Interesting.
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