
New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years - ohjeez
https://www.theguardian.com/science/across-the-universe/2016/apr/14/alien-wow-signal-could-be-explained-after-almost-40-years
======
ptrincr
Forgive me if this is a daft question, but, how much effort has gone into
analysing the contents of this signal?

It appears we have 72 seconds of data to work with, or is it just completely
random data with no pattern at all?

If we did receive an intelligent signal from an extraterrestrial source, what
form do we think or hope it would take? Perhaps something along the lines of
counting out the first 100 prime numbers?

-Edit- so to answer my own question, there is no actual recording of the signal, we only have the intensity of the signal over a period of 72 seconds, represented by 6 characters, each covering a period of 12 seconds.

6EQUJ5

~~~
mrfusion
Why is that? We just didn't record it?

~~~
InclinedPlane
1977\. The intensity data _was_ the recording according to the standard of the
times.

~~~
ANH
Having read about historical radio astronomy and practiced signals analysis, I
think they were a _little_ more sophisticated than that. The recording in this
format was made for easy perusal by a human, say, the next morning. I think
that was the case with this signal. No doubt they wanted to revisit that spot
in the sky looking at intensity, frequency shifting (Doppler), bandwidth,
modulation, etc. But they never saw it again.

Historical point of interest: the Big Ear telescope that recorded this was
bulldozed to make way for a golf course.

~~~
acqq
There's still a "memorial" web site:

[http://www.bigear.org/about.htm](http://www.bigear.org/about.htm)

The Big Ear telescope "was larger than three football fields in size and
equivalent in sensitivity to a circular dish 52.5 meters (175 feet) in
diameter. The telescope consisted of a flat tiltable reflector measuring 340
feet long by 100 feet high (less when tilted), a fixed standing paraboloidal
(curved) reflector which measured 360 feet long by 70 feet high, an aluminum-
covered ground plane measuring 360 feet wide by 500 feet long, and two feed
horns mounted on a movable assembly."

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pavel_lishin
> _Comet 266P /Christensen will pass the Chi Sagittarii star group again on 25
> January 2017, while 335P/Gibbs will make its passage on 7 January 2018.
> Paris plans to observe these events to look for a recurrence of the mystery
> signal. But time is not on his side for using an existing radio telescope –
> they are all booked out._

Can someone explain why he needs to observe them when they're passing in front
of those particular stars?

~~~
TrainedMonkey
I think the point is to reproduce as much of the original conditions as
possible and check for a similar signature. The paper itself, does not explain
the need for exact conditions: [http://planetary-science.org/wp-
content/uploads/2016/01/Pari...](http://planetary-science.org/wp-
content/uploads/2016/01/Paris_Davies-H-I-Line-Signal.pdf)

~~~
acqq
From the comments on the Guardian site, user bllckchps estimates the needed
amount of stuff in the comet to produce the signal:

"Of course, most of the mass is in the nucleus, and will be in molecular form,
unobservable at 1.4GHz. Let's be generous, and allow the comet to be made
purely of water ice (H20) which will dissociate into a neutral hydrogen (H)
and a hydroxyl (OH) as it goes into the halo, meaning that ~1/18 of the mass
can be H.

We're already about a factor of 20 too low to explain the Wow signal, and now
here's another factor of ~20. What fraction of the total mass is in the halo?
Generously, maybe ~1%? So it's about a factor of 40000 too weak to be a
plausible model."

The same user, regarding Antonio Paris, the person who collects the money:

"The web page for his Center for Planetary Science is pretty much just a
collection of stuff taken verbatim from wikipedia. And his twitter feed is
mostly a collection of uncredited images taken from whoever/wherever,
interspersed with exhortations to send him cash for this ridiculous project.

If you follow up the various programmes he has been "involved" in (candidate
astronaut etc) you will see that they are distinctly less impressive than they
might at first seem to the naive. "

Fascinatingly, according to Antonio Paris' LinkedIn profile, he got a Master
degree in 2012 and immediately started to refer to himself as "Professor
Paris" in the "Area 51" documentary directed by... himself!

His "astronaut candidate" program:

[http://projectpossum.org/possum-astronaut-
program/training-p...](http://projectpossum.org/possum-astronaut-
program/training-program-at-embry-riddle/)

Wow, indeed.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Kickstarter once again fails to find intelligent life on Earth.

Apparently there was a "Habitable Planets Field Trip" in 2015.

Sorry to have missed that.

------
interfixus
August the 15th, 1977, signal received. Next day, Elvis dies.

That's just too good of a nutcase story not to be in circulation.

~~~
fapjacks
s/dies/called back to his planet/

~~~
iamdave
...was that a Men in Black reference?

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dak1
This looks like a con job using pseudo-science to get money from well-
intentioned individuals.

~~~
rayvd
I read this as 'cron job'.

~~~
sixothree
Strange, likewise.

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e0m
It's amazing how manual this process still was in the late 70s. Imagine
spending hours and hours pouring over tables of numbers. At the same time,
it's amazing how hard it still is for computers to say "that's interesting".
Sometimes it takes human to go "wow"

~~~
stuartaxelowen
That's because "interestingness" takes a _lot_ of context.

Humans interpret the low dimensional natural world into much higher
dimensional space by turning things into models (cars, cats, science, etc),
and often "wow" comes from a combination of many of those high level
interpretations.

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jkot
Some radio amateur could perhaps help. 40 years is a long time and equipment
is now amazingly cheap.

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wglb
So the amount requested is not all that much money for a radio telescope. A
world-class ham radio tower (200 feet or so with appropriate beams) will run
about $10,000 per each. So the cost requested here is not that out of line.

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allemagne
So if being a byproduct of comets is ruled out, and we take it for granted
that the signal is of extra-terrestrial origin (which apparently has been
pretty much accepted), then we don't have an explanation for the origin under
our current understanding of the cosmos? Is this a correct understanding? How
exciting.

------
joneser005
Did they not find the source of the signal last year?

[http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/10/rogue-
mic...](http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/10/rogue-microwave-
ovens-are-the-culprits-behind-mysterious-radio-signals/)

~~~
makomk
Nah, they knew that those signals were local in origin and the Wow signal
wasn't because the perytons showed up no matter which direction they looked in
whilst the Wow signal was only received on one of the two antenna at the site.

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ceejayoz
Seems unlikely. If undiscovered comets were this prone to putting off such
strong signals, there should be a lot more unexplained "wow!" notations in
notebooks from them.

~~~
TrainedMonkey
I do not think it matters how unlikely it is. As long as it is possible and
there is no surefire culprit the theory needs to be tested, if only to rule it
out.

~~~
ceejayoz
"Probable" and "unlikely" are antonyms. It can't be unlikely and probable.

 _edit:_ The level of likeliness should affect the amount of effort put into
testing the hypothesis. I'd like an explanation from them on why they think
the Wow! signal is so rare if a comet is the explanation - NASA says there
might be as many as a hundred _billion_ comets in the solar system, so
"where's the rest of their signals" is a legit criticism.

~~~
jdmichal
I think it's important to remember how _empty_ space actually is, when taking
this view point. For instance, an object randomly shot through the asteroid
belt has near zero chance of actually hitting anything, and that's a
_relatively_ dense space. The Oort cloud, which is where a large number of the
theoretically unknown comets live, is only about 5 Earth masses.

The bottom line is, pointing a telescope to a random spot in the sky is very,
very likely to find nothing. Even with a billion comets and a billion
asteroids and a billion stars.

~~~
samstave
Forgive the naive question, but ___why_ __is space so empty.

I mean I understand infinite but I'm just really interested in why the
universe is the way that it is.

What is the best theory for this? Has anyone proposed a why?

~~~
maze-le
Because the universe is expanding. Space itself expands the further away you
are from a reference point. That means, everything is moving away from us (on
a grand scale), and the greater the distance to the reference point, the
bigger is the rate things in the universe are moving away from us. I think the
rate is about 70 km/(Mpc _s) - wich is an incredibly small number, scaled down
to a meter it is ~10^-23 m / (m_s). And as space expands over time, the
density of matter in space get lower and lower.

~~~
samstave
ELI5 If space is just empty nothing vacuum - how does it expand?

~~~
Absentinsomniac
Space isn't an empty vacuum, but that's tangential. The expansion in this
context is metric explanation, which just means things are getting further and
further apart between two points due to space "expanding" between non-
gravitationally bound objects. The explanation for "why" is sort of "we don't
know". AFAIK, the leading theory is a combination of momentum / inertia from
the big bang and acceleration from dark energy. Which we also don't know a lot
about.

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LunaSea
"How a team of astronomers embezzled crowd funders into buying them a new
telescope by making them believe they will look for a 'Wow' signal
explanation"

~~~
dang
That's so nastily uncharitable.

I understand the fun in painting what people are doing in the blackest
possible colors. It's a parlor game and gives a buzz to both the writer and
reader. But in doing so, you smear black paint all over the parlor. We're
trying to make HN a better place to be than that, so please don't play that
game here.

~~~
hodwik
LunaSea is making an interesting argument that I hadn't considered.

You on the other hand have levied a substance-less complaint about a user's
attitude. Who is really undermining discourse here?

Pessimism ought to be welcome here. If you need protection from other people's
attitudes go join a university safe space.

~~~
dang
I actually appreciate your point a lot more than it probably seems like I do
(not counting the rude bit, which was out of place and wide of the mark). The
counterargument only becomes compelling when you start to think practically
about the effect snark etc. has on online communities. This is an externality,
so it is easy to overlook and not always in the interest of individual actors
to take care of.

We could compare it to a company that makes a good product (in this case, a
good point about funding and the politics of research) while polluting the
local environment (the community here). The solution isn't to ignore the
pollution, nor to justify it.

Fortunately for all of us, it's not only possible to make the product without
polluting, but the product comes out better when one does so. But this doesn't
happen by default; the default is the opposite. That's why I post moderation
comments, at the cost of off-topicness. In the long run, the plan (and the
unsolved system design problem!) is to get the desired effect without posting
such things, which are as tedious to write as they are to read.

