It’s the evening August 15, 1977, and an Astronomer named Jerry R. Ehman is scanning the skies looking for signs of intelligent life because … what else is an astronomer going to do on a Monday night when he’s located in the outskirts of Delaware, Ohio. He’s accomplishing this (or, trying to anyway) by using this real big dish that scans the cosmos for radio microwaves. Yeah, I don’t get it either. All this talk of dishes and microwaves, I was thinking maybe the aliens were trying to cook some popcorn, but apparently it has something to do with specific types of radio waves that everything in the universe emits, which this huge dish can pick up.
I wanted to ask Neil deGrasse Tyson, the only astrophysicist I know the name of, but I don’t seem to have his number. Perhaps because I’ve never met him, but let’s not confuse this article with too many facts.
By this time, the giant dish has been in use for quite a while and for the most part all the results have been somewhat predictable. They’ve managed to learn a few things, not so much about extraterrestrial life, but stuff about the universe and outer space.
Jerry is looking at these giant computer printouts the big dish is spewing when he sees something he’s not quite prepared for, and for a moment he gets very excited. He circles a particular section of the printout, then just off to the side he writes the word “Wow!” and then he works as hard as he can to find that signal again, but all his efforts prove fruitless.
It would be like … if you were driving your car through Nevada (or some other such similar place where nobody actually lives) and even though you are hundreds of miles away from the nearest radio station, suddenly your car stereo starts playing These Boots Are Made For Walking by Nancy Sinatra. You can’t quite explain why it happened, and no matter how many times you try to go back to where you were, you can’t find that station again, nor can you explain how it was possible you heard what you heard. It’s kind of like that, except, it’s astrophysics.
For us laymen, it might not sound like a big deal. But, for the scientists studying the cosmos – as well as those searching for signs of intelligent life out in the universe – it’s absolutely HUGE.
So, maybe some background info will help us understand.
The Ohio Sky Survey
Back in 1959, Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi are two physicists from Cornell University (which is located in a town called Ithica, which appears to be a real place in New York, and is surprisingly large enough to have a Wal-Mart). They published a paper that suggested that if there was alien life somewhere out there, and if those aliens were trying to communicate with each other, or with us, they’d probably want to use radio signals of a frequency of 1420 megahertz, which is the same rate that hydrogen naturally puts out and this makes sense because hydrogen and stupidity are the two most common elements in the entire universe.
Shortly after this, Ohio State University began building a giant radio telescope outside Delaware, Ohio which they can use to scan for these types of radio waves emanating from somewhere in the cosmos. They’re able to finish building it in 1961, but don’t turn it on for another two years, which is when the Ohio Sky Survey began.
They called this dish Big Ear because it was … well … big (103 meters by 33 meters, roughly the size of a football field if you weren’t good at measuring) and it could listen for things. But officially it was called the Ohio State University Radio Observatory.
Between then and 1971, the Big Ear Radio Telescope managed to catalog (and locate) just under twenty thousand sources of these radio waves. That’s a lot. And many of these were unknown previously, so in some circles that was big news. (Really big news, as it took seven installments and two supplements to release all that data.)
SETI
Let’s say that you spent a ton of money building this huge radio telescope. You use it for a few years to collect a bunch of data. The project comes to an end, which means you don’t need to keep scanning the skies for anything … what are you going to do with the thing? You don’t want to tear it down because what if you wanted to use it a few years down the line for something else …? Maybe you could let other people use it, but really who needs a giant radio telescope?
SETI, despite what you may have seen in certain action science-fiction movies, isn’t a single entity like a governmental program, military unit, nor is it an association with dues and fees, like Aunt Irma’s HOA that keep trying to fine her because her grass is the wrong shade of green. It’s more of an unofficial community, or a philosophical way of seeing advanced science stuff … all about the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence.
And some of these guys … well, they might have a good reason to use Big Ear … as it would allow them to scan the cosmos for alien radio stations or something. Or, the radio waves that Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi were talking about.
Needless to say, since The University of Ohio wasn’t using it, they allowed it to be used for SETI … which is how Jerry found himself using it on August 15, 1977.
The Wow! Signal
You’re probably wondering at this point how Big Ear worked. Sadly, I’m a historian and not an astronomer or an astrophysicist and honestly it all sounds like rocket science to me, which I suppose it technically isn’t, but … whatever. But, I’ll see what I can do.
So, you have this big radio telescope – which is kind of like the telescope we used in high school science classes, except rather than light bouncing off particles, it deals with radio waves that things tend to emit … and it’s much, much, much larger.
This telescope was controlled by a computer (and since this is the 1970s, a computer with the processing power of your iPhone would be roughly the size of a small house, I’d like to think this computer was approximately the size of New Jerzey. It wasn’t, but a man can dream, right?
This computer not only helped to move the radio telescope (because sometimes you want to listen to a different part of the sky) but it would also take the data the telescope would “hear” and print it out on these huge rolls of paper.
It would assign a letter to certain signal to noise intensities, starting with 0 to 9 on the low end, then jumping to letter for the higher. Most often, the printout would be a stream of 0s, 1s, 2s, 3s, 4s, maybe a little higher … or, in a few places, like it if was pointed at a specific star, for example, you might get a slightly higher reading.
Therefore, when the printout read 6EQUJ5 … that’s a major arc of intensity … and something these SETI researchers probably weren’t expecting to see. Something was out there that was a bit … different … and they’ve been trying to figure it out ever since.
That unexpected surprise is why Jerry circled the thing in red … and write “Wow!” off to the side.
Theories
If you scour the internet long enough, you can find enough potential explanations for The Wow Symbol to make your head spin.
Quite frankly, it could be perfectly natural … something like a twinkling star. However, in this case, the radio waves from that star would have had to be amplified somehow, perhaps via something in Earth’s atmosphere or maybe some gas emissions from Uranus. (Ok, which bozo seriously thought it would be a good idea to name one of the gassiest planets Urans? What’s that? His name was Johann Elert Bode? Was he a third grader? No. Well, never mind that then.)
If it turns out that the signal wasn’t natural … then we can’t exactly rule out that something out there created it for some reason. Is it possible that one alien was trying to communicate with another alien? Sure. Is it possible that The Wow Signal was a message from an alien being trying to communicate with us, something about being able to finally solve The Three Body Problem? (Or, am I watching too much Netflix?)
The thing is – we just don’t know. Not for sure.
Currently, the going theory is that the signal came from a sun over a thousand light years away, but the signal passed through an odd hydrogen cloud which amplified it before it got picked up by Big Ear.
But, a few years ago, we thought it was most likely something else … and chances are, at some point in the near future, we may start to think it was something else entirely.
Nearly every aspect of The Wow Signal remains a mystery. Perhaps one day we’ll find a solution. But, till then … it’s kind of fun to geuss.
