
Astronomer claims to have solved the 40-year old mystery of the “Wow!” signal - Huhty
https://futurism.com/the-40-year-old-mystery-of-the-wow-signal-was-just-solved/
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DrBazza
No, this is work of one person published in an obscure journal, not A&A, or
ApJ, or MNRAS, for example. BBC Horizon covered his idea recently. That's not
to say it isn't right, just that the solution is still not agreed upon. Fast
radio bursts only recently discovered, indicate how much we still don't know
because there's just so much sky to cover, at so many frequencies.

~~~
JadeNB
> No, this is work of one person published in an obscure journal, not A&A, or
> ApJ, or MNRAS, for example. BBC Horizon covered his idea recently. That's
> not to say it isn't right, just that the solution is still not agreed upon.

The current story title is "Astronomer claims to have solved …", so 'No' seems
not to be appropriate here (although the background you provide is surely
valuable for _evaluating_ that claim).

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netcraft
The actual title of the article is "The 40-Year Old Mystery of the “Wow!”
Signal Was Just Solved"

~~~
dsp1234
More specifically, this was the title at the time that DrBazza made that
comment. It was changed to the current title afterwords.

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rimunroe
A friend of mine mentioned the paper referenced in the article as as being
super sketchy, and another astronomer said that it appeared to be a story
constructed entirely of red flags. I'll summarize as best I can:

* The journal the author claims it was published in (the Washington Academy of Sciences) doesn't seem to a reputation to speak of, or even have anything to do with radio astronomy [http://www.washacadsci.org/journal/](http://www.washacadsci.org/journal/). Additionally, they haven't updated their catalog since 2013, so there's no way to even tell if it was published.

* The author has been accused of exaggerating his credentials before. He is an adjunct professor teaching two introductory courses at St. Petersburg College. He got a position as the Manager of Planetarium and Space Science Studies at the Museum of Science & Industry in Tampa, FL, which he announced on his website as "[Museum of Science and Industry] MOSI Selects Prof. Antonio Paris to Lead Space Program" ([http://planetary-science.org/mosi-selects-prof-antonio-paris...](http://planetary-science.org/mosi-selects-prof-antonio-paris-to-lead-space-program/)). Additionally, his other credentials are suspect too. He claims to be the principal investigator at the site-B 10-meter radio telescope in central Florida. The "site-B 10-meter radio telescope" is his truck-mounted telescope.

> He also describes himself as an astronaut candidate with Project Possum, a
> four day suborbital flight program, and the director—and apparently also the
> sole employee—of the Center for Planetary Science, which he also founded.
> There's been a bit of disagreement as to Paris' education and the accuracy
> of his work, which Paris vehemently disputes. He claims that he was a former
> US Army Intelligence officer and as such, much of his life's work is
> classified. It's not exactly a clear-cut history

from [http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a20128/a-researcher-
is...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a20128/a-researcher-is-
crowdfunding-an-investigation-into-a-possible-alien-signal/)

* A year when there were stories about him running a Kickstarter to buy a new radio telescope because all the other ones were booked for the year. Others pointed out that this was not true [https://www.theguardian.com/science/across-the-universe/2016...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/across-the-universe/2016/apr/14/alien-wow-signal-could-be-explained-after-almost-40-years#comment-72367743) and super sketchy (read through the other comments too). It appears that he just wanted people to buy him stuff, not for any actual investigatory need.

* Everything on this story has been sourced from [http://planetary-science.org/](http://planetary-science.org/). planetary-science.org appears to be run by the author and the author alone.

* The paper the article covers offers no actual comparison between the magnitude of the signal received and the original Wow! Signal. It only shows the raw signal on his own equipment, so there's no way to determine its magnitude relative to the original. The paper handwaves the question of magnitudes away as the original telescope being more sensitive, or the comet being older now.

[edit] [https://xkcd.com/1847/](https://xkcd.com/1847/)

~~~
todd3834
I found these statements interesting at first but I got a little turned off
after relizing they were mostly ad hominem. Except for the last one.

~~~
rimunroe
I don't think bringing up someone's past behavior is at all irrelevant or a
cheap tactic. The main issue I had wasn't that there is a paper that has holes
in it, but that the sites that have been covering it clearly didn't do any
referencing first. Even if the journalists and people covering this paper
weren't scientists, they could & should have evaluated it for significance. I
don't know what to say other than that there are a lot of things here that
should stand out to non-experts as suspect. People who cover this should make
even a cursory effort to find out if what they're reporting on is real. A part
of that is determining if the source is legitimate, and a part of THAT is
looking at their source's past behavior & claims.

[edit] specifically, the personal-website-masquerading-as-real-organization-
page, unheard of journal, and exaggerated credentials are all the hallmarks of
people who come up with proofs for perpetual motion, ways to trisect an angle
with a straightedge, and how time travel is possible. If you work publicly in
science, or are just listed on the faculty page of a university department,
your email gets bombarded with these papers constantly.

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noja
Was "just" solved in a 2016 paper?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal#Cometary_emissions...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal#Cometary_emissions_as_likely_explanation)

~~~
ubernostrum
Paper in 2016, first chance to empirically test the theory was in late January
2017, and now it's early June when a paper about the test makes it into a
journal. Seems reasonable to wait for a published paper post-test before
declaring it "solved", yes?

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pavel_lishin
Isn't this trivially verifiable?

266P/Christensen and 335P/Gibbs seem to have a period of about six and a half
years.

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powertower
I wonder if this is also a plausible explanation for the RF signals that
Nikola Tesla observed earlier on in last century that [he thought] was of
ET/alien origin - due to its repetitive nature.

~~~
bbctol
Probably not, since this signal wouldn't be repetitive, and one of the
significant aspects of the Wow signal is that it didn't repeat.

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Baeocystin
They have an interesting hypothesis. It would be a lot stronger, IMO, if the
second horn had picked up the signal as well. Still, I am happy to see this
kind of thought going in to the problem!

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greglindahl
This article is terrible and not fact-checked. The Chinese just built a
telescope bigger than Arecibo[1], and the 140 foot telescope in West Virginia
used to be used for SETI before it was essentially retired... in 2001.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_hundred_meter_Aperture_Sp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_hundred_meter_Aperture_Spherical_Telescope)

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diminish
Wow! but is there consensus that the source is a pair of commets with clouds
of hyrogen emittting at 1420MHz?

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michaelcampbell
> The Wow! Signal was detected at 1420MHz, which is the radio frequency
> hydrogen naturally emits.

What does mean? Hydrogen (and presumably other gasses) just spontaneously emit
EMR at some specific frequency?

~~~
greglindahl
Yes. This particular line is the spin flip transition:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_line)
and is low enough energy that cool clouds of molecular hydrogen emit it. And
that's why radio astronomers frequently observe at this frequency.

~~~
michaelcampbell
Huh, thanks. Today I learned...

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Simulacra
This is a very interesting idea but I am suspicious of the source, and
additional corroboration. Perhaps this will spur others to look into it and
could turn out to be right. Such is science..

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madaxe_again
Well, at least it wasn't people microwaving their lunch.

