In 1977, the Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope received an unusually strong narrowband radio signal, leading to widespread excitement about the possibility of having encountered evidence of life beyond Earth.
At the time, astronomer Jerry Ehman spotted the highly unusual outburst in printed out records, annotating the major radio band fluctuation with the word “Wow!” in red pen, thereby giving it a memorable nickname: the “Wow! Signal.”
The incident has remained a mystery for decades, never spotted again in over 48 years, leaving plenty of questions in its wake. Where did it come from, and why did it only last for 72 seconds?
Now, Harvard astronomer and alien hunter Avi Loeb has a wild new theory about the signal. In a new blog post, he suggested that interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, which is currently cruising through our solar system, could’ve sent off the signal back in 1977 — when it was still 600 times the distance between the Earth and Sun away from us.
Examining the sky coordinates of the object and the Wow! Signal, Loeb concluded that the “chance of two random directions in the sky being aligned to that level is about 0.6 percent.”
“If the ‘Wow! Signal’ originated from 3I/ATLAS, how powerful was the transmitter?” he wrote, once again raising the possibility that the object could be an artifact from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization.
Ever since it was first observed in July, 3I/ATLAS — only the third interstellar object ever spotted — has fascinated scientists. Loeb has previously pointed to the object’s unusual chemical makeup, its peculiar path taking it close to the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and its enormous suspected size to suggest that it could be a piece of technology sent to us by an alien race.
For his latest theory about the Wow! Signal, Loeb suggested that 3I/ATLAS would’ve had to have a power source of 0.5 to 2 gigawatts to send off the Wow! Signal from 600 astronomical units away, equivalent to the “output of a typical nuclear reactor on Earth.”
It’s a far-fetched theory that would require plenty of additional data to confirm.
“So far, no radio telescope reported data on 3I/ATLAS,” Loeb wrote. “Here’s hoping that the coincidence in the arrival direction of 3I/ATLAS and the ‘Wow! Signal’ would motivate radio observers to check whether 3I/ATLAS shows any radio transmission around the hyperfine line of hydrogen.”
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