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WOW signal solved. Not aliens!


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Not unexpected news for some of us.... but just posting as its 'in the news'
 

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Solved: Mysterious 'Wow! signal' in 1977 was not a message from aliens but triggered by gas from passing COMETS

    The Wow! signal was detected by a radio telescope in Ohio in 1977
    Conspiracy theorists have long believed it was radio contact from alien life
    But an astronomer has traced two comets to the same region of the sky
    He then measured those comets as they passed by Earth earlier this year
    The astronomer found that the two comets produced similar radio bursts to those seen in 1977


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4576358/Mysterious-alien-Wow-signal-caused-comets.html#ixzz4jERy2UG3


 

 

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 I read the article. It's still not clear that a signal of the appropriate high strength (30 sigma at Ohio State University's 'Big Ear' radio observatory) and a similar, very narrow, bandwidth  (approximately 10Khz) was received. There is also the problem that the signal was not seen on the following nights at OSU. Comets move slowly enough in space that this should have been possible. 

Incidentally, the article refers to 'bursts' of radio energy. Its not clear that a 'burst' was received in 1977. The signal was heard for the length of time it took the Earth's rotation to sweep the antenna's beam through a given point in the sky. 

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There is a problem about the weakness of the radio emissions from comets, recently reported by Dr. Paris. Even when allowing for the much smaller antenna he used, the signal is still much too weak to match the wow signal.

Paris had to invoke a scenario in which the comets lost much of their signal-generating hydrogen gas since 1977. This is possible, but highly speculative. The comets could just as easily have added more gas than was lost, via sublimation, a process very common in comets. 

Dr. Paris received signals from the comets on a number of dates, during their recent pass. Why could the much superior OSU receiver detect the wow signal only once, if it originated from these comets?  

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On 09/06/2017 at 10:45 AM, bison said:

Dr. Paris received signals from the comets on a number of dates, during their recent pass. Why could the much superior OSU receiver detect the wow signal only once, if it originated from these comets?  

Could it be that Dr. Paris was tracking the comet(s) while the OSU receiver was aimed at a one point in the sky, hence only the single signal received by the OSU receiver?

I don't know enough about it, my comment is just a thought, could it be the reason why? (Or completely wrong?)

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Perhaps something is tagging along on those comets that produced the signal?

That might explain the duration of it. The piste above seem to have made a better point of this.

Or it's neither of these ideas... hmmm

Edited by s.hal0mega.b
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Hmmm, it was not so long time ago that I last time read that they had found an explanation for the Wow signal. It can't have been more than a couple of years ago. It might even have been here at UM that I read it. So, now they have found yet another explanation. How many explanations can there be?

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55 minutes ago, fred_mc said:

Hmmm, it was not so long time ago t. hat I last time read that they had found an explanation for the Wow signal. It can't have been more than a couple of years ago. It might even have been here at UM that I read it. So, now they have found yet another explanation. How many explanations can there be?

IRC last time too the speculation was that comets caused the  signal. 

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The same proposed cometary explanation for the wow signal was making the rounds about 18 months ago. It was due to Antonio Paris then, too. The difference is that now he's made some observations. 

The Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University was stationary. The rotation of the Earth swept its beam through the various points in space. If a comet was the source of the wow signal, it would have had its location scanned the next, and ensuing days, and should have been received again. The wow signal was heard only once. Because of this daily sweep of the heavens, it was expected, at the time, that the signal, whatever its source, might be heard again.

A comet's emissions might vary from day to day, of course, but given the very strong nature of the signal (30 sigma) it seems reasonable that the highly sensitive 'Big Ear' should have heard something from the comet on successive days. A true SETI signal, on the other hand, might have been turned off in the meantime, or had its beam shifted to another star system.      

Edited by bison
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2 hours ago, bison said:

The same proposed cometary explanation for the wow signal was making the rounds about 18 months ago. It was due to Antonio Paris then, too. The difference is that now he's made some observations. 

The Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University was stationary. The rotation of the Earth swept its beam through the various points in space. If a comet was the source of the wow signal, it would have had its location scanned the next, and ensuing days, and should have been received again. The wow signal was heard only once. Because of this daily sweep of the heavens, it was expected, at the time, that the signal, whatever its source, might be heard again.

A comet's emissions might vary from day to day, of course, but given the very strong nature of the signal (30 sigma) it seems reasonable that the highly sensitive 'Big Ear' should have heard something from the comet on successive days. A true SETI signal, on the other hand, might have been turned off in the meantime, or had its beam shifted to another star system.      

Depends on comet movement across the sky. As per Paris in drift scan signal lasted 20 and less seconds (Figs 10-12).

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I think next time would be a "HEY! OVER HERE!" signal, since the aliens would know that we are hard to be convinced! :D

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I always figured it was some sort of natural phenomenon. I just can't see any intelligent species doing much of anything only once and for it to only last seconds. That small length of time almost had to make it an odd special sort of natural thing. We have a history of misunderstanding odd natural signals. Pulsars did it to us many years ago too. 

We seem to want to not be alone and hang onto anything  that gives us any hope. This one though was a loooooong shot from the start. On the flip side many people are just sure that it can't be because we haven't detected them already. Those people either don't grasp the situation and the mathematical odds against it even if aliens are fairly common in time and space. The universe in unimaginably big and 13 billion years is an immensely big chunk of time. Think of it like this. Imagine how many grains of salt there are in a pound of salt. Blow it into one of the really big enclosed dome stadium. Wait a year while the dome is used and cleaned...then give someone 5 minutes to find one of those grains of salt. But there were a LOT of grains!!! Yes there were but you can't find any of them in 5 minutes. We have been looking for less than a hundred years with instruments sensitive enough to really count. Your chances of finding one of those grains of salt are better than your odds of picking up a radio signal from another world. 

Nonetheless we need to keep looking. The longer we look the better our chances will be. I think that mankind is in great need of new frontiers and new challenges. Only something from the outside will ever pull us together. We keep repeating the same mistakes over and over because people never change and in general our world is changing less and less as we "civilize" more and more of our planet. History will teach you if you will truely look at it with an open mind that there is no standing still. You are either moving forward or sliding back. We as a species are sliding back and eventually something is going to happen that will basically RESET the ecology of our planet. That reset may or may not have a place in it for humans. 

Ti me after time the life on our planet has been almost totally wiped out. We as a species may be running out of time. If you think we will survive another extinction event you are probably misinformed. We as a species have become massively specialized. I doubt that one tenth of one percent of the people on Earth would survive even if the only thing that happened was the power goes off and doesn't come back on. Throw in some sort of cataclysmic environmental change and we might become the latest dinosaurs..just another extinct species that have almost 70 million years and just didn't make it. 

I suspect that this sort of cycle is very much the norm universally. Even when life arises and evolves to intelegence it is a race for them to come together and them move out and of their one fragile planet before something wipes the board again and it starts from the bottom again. When we are listening we may be trying to detect little more than a blink in time that a species is making noise that we can detect. Their signals may have come and gone here before we could listen or it may not get here for hundreds of years. On top of everything else as a species advances they get quieter. We are not nearly as noisy as we were and in the future we will just get quieter. Broadcast signals that are pointed out are slowly stopping as we move it to satellites that focus more effectively down. 

 

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40 minutes ago, DanL said:

I always figured it was some sort of natural phenomenon. I just can't see any intelligent species doing much of anything only once and for it to only last seconds. That small length of time almost had to make it an odd special sort of natural thing. We have a history of misunderstanding odd natural signals. Pulsars did it to us many years ago too.

I don't think Bell et al took their "little green men" hypothesis too seriously after the discovery of the first pulsar in late-1967. And by the end of 1968 twenty or so had been discovered, so astronomers weren't baffled for too long: especially as in the 1930's Zwicky had predicted neutron stars, and in the mid-1960's Pacini had suggested spinning neutron stars would radiate pulses of electromagnetic energy. The WOW! signal mystery has endured far longer.

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11 hours ago, nellandwinnie said:

And the donations for further research come pouring in Once Again!

Because they offered a reasonable and evidence-backed explanation? 

What a stupid comment. 

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22 hours ago, bison said:

 If a comet was the source of the wow signal, it would have had its location scanned the next, and ensuing days, and should have been received again.

Wrong.

A comet is a moving source. Over the next few days it would not have been in the same place and so the likelihood is that it would not have been picked up by a search looking for a signal coming from the same point in space, thus a PERFECT explanation of why the signal was not received again.

Your argument expects us to believe that the signal can't have come from a comet, which was exactly in the right place to be the source of the signal because that would have been too much of a coincidence for it to have only been detected once, yet a signal from an alien intelligence was broadcast at EXACTLY the right moment that, many years later, it would be detected by a radio telescope on Earth, bit, despite years of listening, never heard from again... and this ISN'T too much of a coincidence.

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On 2017-06-11 at 5:03 PM, kartikg said:

IRC last time too the speculation was that comets caused the  signal. 

Ok. You might very well be right, I don't remember what it was that time, only that they said that they had probably found the source then too.

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I'm sure a comet would have not gave off such a unique signal as the wow signal. I mean when this first happened they would have had to consider it been a comet back then! and it was rurled out by scientist to be anything known to man

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I think life is special and unique. I really think we are the abnormality in this universe. It was an unexplainable event. I don't know how someone could conclusively say "it was this comet". Who knows. There are so many mysteries out there. 

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So it was a comet giving off flatulence...ok :D

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7 hours ago, Adampadum123 said:

I'm sure a comet would have not gave off such a unique signal as the wow signal.[...]

Unique in what way?

7 hours ago, Adampadum123 said:

[...] I mean when this first happened they would have had to consider it been a comet back then! and it was rurled out by scientist to be anything known to man

Comet 266P/Christensen was discovered in 2006, almost 30 years after wow detection.

And, BTW,  hypothesis about cometary origin of wow signal was tested successfully.

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Latest -

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A controversial claim that the famous ‘Wow!’ signal was produced by comets and not extraterrestrial intelligence has been met with scepticism by radio astronomers and comet experts, sparking a fresh debate about the nature of this mysterious signal.

https://astronomynow.com/2017/06/11/comet-claim-for-mysterious-wow-signal-sparks-controversy/

 

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I can give a certified best guess until the next certified best guess comes around...

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