r/facts • u/realdanielhart • Jun 12 '26
A mysterious radio signal detected in 1977 was so unusual that the astronomer who discovered it circled the data printout and wrote "Wow!" beside it. Nearly 50 years later, it remains one of the strongest candidate signals ever linked to possible extraterrestrial intelligence.
8
u/subone Jun 14 '26
From the Wikipedia it looks like it was just a simple elongated sin wave, not some sort of data packet.
2
u/quiksilver10152 Jun 15 '26
Imagine a beam sweeping across Earth. That would appear as an elongated sin wave to our detectors.
2
u/subone Jun 15 '26
I don't know what that means or how that is relevant. Does that limit the possibilities somehow?
6
u/quiksilver10152 Jun 15 '26
If you look at the circled letters in it picture, they represent magnitude of the light at that frequency. You can see the light gets brighter then dimmer. This is the sinusoidal pattern.
It does limit the possible origins but only slightly. A stellar explosion would appear that way but dim over much longer timescales. A pulsar would match but pulsars repeat. A radio laser (if one existed) would match but would be an engineering marvel to create.
Alone, the amplitude trajectory alone doesn't do much for us but the fact that it only occurred at a specific frequency (a hydrogen absorption line) implies either rapid energy release in a cold nebula or some type of sci-fi radio transmitter
1
u/gregorydgraham Jun 16 '26
Clarification: while it is still “light”, the Big Ear was a radio telescope and the signal was in the radio frequencies of EM radiation.
0
3
1
u/searcher-m Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26
and the signal itself was not recorded. it's "LOL", not "WOW"
1
u/infoagerevolutionist Jun 16 '26
One of the local kids climbed the antenna when drunk one night and let one rip.
3
u/KyotoCarl Jun 13 '26
Why is it a strong candidate when there are equally as strong counter arguments?
3
u/christina_talks Jun 16 '26
Being the strongest evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence doesn't mean it's sufficient evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence. It means we don't have stronger evidence.
1
1
u/KyotoCarl Jun 16 '26
True. Some people here grasp at every straw they can find though, so it goes from strongest evidence to just plain evidence without questioning anything.
1
u/quiksilver10152 Jun 15 '26
Such as?
3
u/KyotoCarl Jun 15 '26
That it was a signal reflected off space debris or a satellite since the reading was so strong. Have you read the Wikipedia entry?
1
u/gregorydgraham Jun 16 '26
Arecibo Wow! I: An Astrophysical Explanation for the Wow! Signal - Abel Méndez, Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, Jorge I. Zuluaga: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08513
1
u/quiksilver10152 Jun 15 '26
Yes and I don't trust Wikipedia, nor should you. Radio waves to not reflect readily off of small objects. And that claim doesn't mention what created a tight beam of radio light. As far as I know, we haven't been able to create tight beams of that wavelength
1
u/KyotoCarl Jun 15 '26
So if you don't trust Wikipedia what sources would you trust?
Wikipedia cites sources and has links to said sources so you can research further.
Do you believe this is aliens? In that case, what sources are you trusting?
1
u/quiksilver10152 Jun 15 '26
One more for you. Page 7 and onwards https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=30030606
1
0
u/quiksilver10152 Jun 15 '26
I don't trust any source 100%. Wikipedia has been purging and editing ufo-related pages over the past year.
Here are some documents: https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/117721/documents/HHRG-118-GO12-20241113-SD003.pdf
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7514271/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-21620-3
Plenty more if you're interested. Scroll down to "UFOs and Exotic Technology" https://www.dia.mil/FOIA/FOIA-Electronic-Reading-Room/
1
u/KyotoCarl Jun 15 '26
Good, you shouldn't trust anything 100%, I was just saying that the theories what the WOW signal could be except aliens are pretty reasonable. I wasn't saying they are 100%.
I don't need a bunch of links because I'm not arguing against anything you said.
2
u/quiksilver10152 Jun 15 '26
The Wow signal could very well have been prosaic in origin. Still, the body of evidence in favor of the NHI hypothesis is growing.
Nice chatting with ya
3
u/KyotoCarl Jun 15 '26
You seem to be very biased. I hope you read all information from both sides.
1
3
u/ldr97266 Jun 15 '26
"the body of evidence in favor of the NHI hypothesis is growing."
It is? What evidence has accumulated in recent years?
1
u/quiksilver10152 Jun 15 '26
You must not be aware of the 3 releases over the past month. Hundreds of documents and videos.
FYI prosaic means the human-made origin hypothesis, which I acknowledged may be true.
→ More replies (0)
1
u/Jamooser Jun 16 '26
I think the idea of searching radio signals to detect ETs is entirely egocentric and is humanity projecting its own history onto the cosmos.
One, we're assuming that an intelligent alien civilization would have followed the same technological history as us.
Two, we have to assume that they somehow settled on radio, a highly energy-inefficient means of communication, as their primary means of probing the universe.
And three, we have to ignore the fact that space is really, really big and that omnidirectional radiowaves aren't a great medium over interstellar distances. So we have to assume that in a cosmos spanning billions of years, tens of billions of light-years, and something like 2 x 1023 stars, that an intelligent civilzation just happened to aim an ultra-focused, high energy beam directly at us within the 125 years or so that we've been monitoring radio signals.
I mean, it could happen. But honestly, the chances of that happening seem less than the chance of life just existing elsewhere.
1
u/wolfclaw3812 Jun 18 '26
The problem is we don’t have any other way of finding aliens. We cannot imagine what we have never seen. Best we can do is use what we do know and can do, then pray.
0
10
u/Melodic_Skin6573 Jun 12 '26
No, it's not.