An inexpert astronomer dissect thousands of stars in the country the famous Wow ! signal came from has proposed a potential Sun - like star as the generator of the mysterious signaling that come over 40 geezerhood ago . His likely suspect is described in a new pre - print paper ( yet to be peer - reviewed)published on arXiv .
On August 15 , 1977 , at the Big Ear wireless telescope lookout at Ohio State University , a narrowband radiocommunication signaling was get .
A few days afterward , uranologist Jerry Ehman critique the data and noticed the signaling episode , which go for a full 72 seconds . In the margin next to the printout , he but wrote " Wow ! " , and thus the bewilder signal had a name that would stick for the next 43 years at least .
The signaling has , so far , defied explanation , and that ’s not for a lack of try out . Researchers argued the subject for it being acomet passingthrough the area Big Ear was listening to , only for that to becompletely refutedabout two days later by the squad that detected the Wow ! signal in the first billet , as a cometwould have give rise a diffuse signalgiven the large area they overcompensate , rather than the dead abbreviate - off signal that was receive .
The signaling has been a source of guess in the " alien are out there " community of interests , and not without reason . No other signaling like it has been detected before or since . It was in a compass of frequencies close to thehydrogen line , which isrelatively innocent from background racket , making it a estimable cooking stove to nibble were we to try andcommunicate with other civilizationsourselves .
On top of that , the team themselves believed it to be a good nominee for extraterrestrial life . " The ' Wow ! ' signaling is highly significative of extraterrestrial intelligent origin but little more can be say until it returns for further study , " Ohio State University Radio Observatory theatre director John Kraus wrote in aletter to Carl Sagan in 1994 , a man you do n’t want to embarrass yourself in front of with whacky science if you ’re an stargazer .
In the new paper , Alberto Caballero searched through the European Space Agency ’s Gaia data – a database ofaround 1.3 billion stars – for star in the signal ’s region that are similar to our own , specifically trying to narrow the hunting down to stars that might host an exoplanet with potential for life . This type of search was n’t design to figure out on the dot what it is , say if it ’s from a natural source , but to nail down down the hunt were it to be from an foreign civilization .
As Caballero explain in a video on his popular YouTube pageThe Exoplanets Channelas well as in his composition , he managed to contract the candidates down to one star .
" The only potential Sun - corresponding star in all the Wow ! signal realm is likely 2MASS 19281982 - 2640123 , " hewrote in the paper . " Despite this wizard is locate too far for sending any response in the form of a wireless or light source transmission , it could be a great target to make observations searching for exoplanets around the superstar . "
He also found 14 other likely candidates that he was less confident about , given that the luminosity of the ace was unknown .
We ca n’t harness out that the mysterious signal that has puzzled astronomer for four tenner was n’t a man - made signal – let ’s not forget the metre another mysterious signalturned out to be a microwave oven – nor that it ’s coming from some other as yet unknown source . However , await at the wizard he ’s discover a bit closer could n’t hurt .
