Scientists have re-examined the raw data from the “Wow!” signal that came to us from space in 1977. They discovered a number of inaccuracies in previous studies, one of which was that its power had previously been underestimated.
“Wow signal!”
In 1977, the Big Ear Radio Telescope in Ohio (USA), while conducting routine monitoring of the sky, picked up a brief signal that did not resemble any known to astronomers. This mysterious pulse was named “Wow!” Recently, a group of enthusiasts discovered new details about it.
Over the decades since then, this event has been repeatedly cited as proof of the existence of extraterrestrials, refuted, and written about in a ton of analyses devoted to questions about what the signal actually could have been and where it came from. The observatory has been converted into a golf course, but all the raw records from it have been preserved.
It was these 75,000 pages of text that volunteers analyzed, combining manual recognition with the capabilities of modern computing technology. This allowed them to refine several signal parameters.
Refined data
The first thing scientists determined was that the signal frequency was not 1420.4556 MHz, as previously thought, but 1420.726 MHz. It’s not such a big difference, but it led to a reassessment of the characteristics of the hypothetical source.
The second is the narrowing of the section of the sky from which the signal came. This action has been taken before, but now scientists can significantly narrow down the list of candidates for its source. Third and most importantly, the strength, or more precisely, the density of the signal flow has increased.
Ultimately, the signal remains as mysterious as ever, although the article attempts to shed light on potential sources. They completely rule out any artificial sources, pointing out that there were no known operating television stations in Ohio at the time, as well as no satellites overhead that could have caused the signal. The moon was also on the other side of the planet at that time, so nothing was reflected from it.
The sun was also not very active that year. Therefore, the most likely candidates for the source remain some objects in deep space. More precisely, there is a high probability that there is some kind of cloud of ionized hydrogen.
According to phys.org
