The Mystery Of The Wow! Signal!

“Are we alone in the Universe?”
This is one of the most fascinating questions ever, and I personally ask it to myself every time I watch the sky at night. While we cannot give a precise answer to this question yet, you may be surprised to hear that we may have already received a communication from space… in fact, in 1977, astronomers detected a signal that may have been sent from an alien civilization! Do you want to hear more about that? Watch this video and I will tell you!
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Our story starts in 1973, at the Ohio State University, where the radio telescope named ‘Big Ear’ was assigned to look at the sky searching for signs of extraterrestrial life, as part of the SETI project. A radio telescope is like a giant antenna able to detect radio waves, the electromagnetic waves with longest wavelength.
About four years later, on the night of August 15, 1977, something unexpected happened: the radiotelescope detected a signal that was different from any other previously observed.
The first person who realized this was the astronomer Jerry Ehman, a few days later. While he was analyzing the data from Big Ear, Ehman observed a sudden jump in the intensity of the signal recorded by the telescope at 22:16 Eastern Time Zone, on the night of August 15. The signal recorded by the detector was measured over an interval of 12 seconds, and then printed out as a single character corresponding to the average of the intensity of the signal over each interval. Therefore, the output analyzed by Ehman was a sequence of characters, each of them representing the average intensity of the signal every 12 seconds.
The characters used in this system were the following: a space indicated a signal intensity of zero, numbers between 1 and 9 indicated increasing intensity, while signals with intensity of 10 or above were represented using letters: ‘A’ corresponded to a signal intensity of 10, ‘B’ to a signal intensity of 11, and so on.
Normally, the printouts analyzed by Ehman only contained a mix of space characters together with the digits 1 and 2, representing low-intensity signals corresponding to background noise. However, while checking the data from August 15, Ehman was shocked by finding a sequence of 6 consecutive characters very different from the rest: ‘6EQUJ5’. He was so surprised when he found this sequence that he circled it and he wrote the word “Wow!” next to it: consequently, this signal later became known as “Wow! signal”.
As we said before, each character represents the average intensity of the signal over 12 seconds: so, this sequence of 6 characters corresponds to a signal of 72 seconds in total. However, this doesn’t mean that the real signal coming from space lasted 72 seconds. In fact, Big Ear was configured to “watch” towards a fixed direction, relying on the rotation of the Earth to scan across the sky. Considering the speed of the Earth’s rotation and the size of the telescope, this means that Big Ear could observe a given point in space only for 72 seconds. So the Wow sequence, 6EQUJ5, was recorded during the time window in which the telescope was observing the region of space where this signal came from. 72 seconds later, Big Ear was already pointing to another portion of sky, and so the signal disappeared. The recorded intensity increases in the first half of the sequence (6-E-Q) and then decreases in the second half (U-J-5), with a peak of 30 at the centre, in correspondence of the letter ‘U’. These two facts together mean that the signal observed by Big Ear was continuous, and with a duration of at least 72 seconds, possibly more. However, we also know that the signal lasted less than 3 minutes.
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Credits: Ron Miller
Credits: Nasa/Shutterstock/Storyblocks/Elon Musk/SpaceX/Esa
Credits: Flickr

Video Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:40 Where It Began
01:16 Discovery of the Wow! Signal
03:32 Analyzing the Signal
08:52 Possible Explanations

#insanecuriosity #wowsignal #astronomy

[StarFleet_Tech]

Signals from the United Federation of Planets..."come join us and we will help you get your planet in order. Peacefully."

[moboogie]

It all sounds cool but I don’t understand why we would want to communicate with an unknown entity. Stranger Danger Stranger Danger

[daniel]

I was familiar with the wow signal but now ive watched this changes things 👌👏👏

[amangogna]

Think about how vast is the universe and ask that same question again! Great video !

[djmace]

Fascinating. I do wonder if there really is other intelligent life out there, and if they too are searching the skies for other civilisations.

[sonnyburnett]

We want to know and meet others out there and it seems natural they would feel the same, Technology aside.

[kennycarter]

Sadly it happened 40-50 years too soon

[paulmacdonald]

They will not find intelligence on this planet.

[jasonwebb]

The video says that the Voyager probes are travelling at 15km a second. This is very wrong. If they were going 900km an hour that would mean it's only traveling 559mph. The probes however are travelling at the speed of 35, 000mph. This is a very huge difference. So I have to ask. Was the wow signal really 10km a second? Radio waves are pretty fast.

[garysaunders]

Careful examination of the printout of the 1977 Wow! signal
reveals that it has two simple messages. One of these is
a code for relating the four letters of DNA to four
frequencies that are 10 KHz apart. Another discovery may
be related to the Wow! signal. The genome of an organism
has in its DNA sequence many sections that do not match
the DNA sequences of the genome of the organism that is
most closely related. This unmatched DNA is called New DNA.
Normal DNA of two closely related organisms will be nearly
identical with about one in one hundred letters not matching.
These DNA sequences have been slowly mutating since three
and a half billion years ago. This is old DNA. The New DNA
was possibly inserted into the genome about a million
years ago and so is very new compared to old normal DNA.
It is possible that the alien civilization that inserted
the New DNA a million years ago when our ancestors were
primitive have sent us a radio signal now that we can
sequence DNA. This suggests that we should send them a
message by radio using the code of frequency for DNA
letters to communicate a New DNA sequence that has been
found. How will they respond if we do this?

[mailasun]

The Goa’uld wants to know your location

[GregJay]

Trying to figure out the whole purpose of the big ear, what good is it if you can't decipher the signal? I don't know but it was strong whatever it was, Ridiculous that tells nothing big ear was worthless, no wonder they tore it down, star travelling ET's do not use radio waves way to slow,

[kathykline]

Yes we can explain, 2 and 3 rd take two translations and its concerning. 1st you take 5 and 6 and convert them to alpha - Take the whole thing in caps, and then put in translator, from Czech to English and it says F---ing.

[kvarnerinfoTV]

To be honest, that is dumb question. We, Esrthling are not even alone in solar system, snd regarding tech advanced civilisations...our galaxy is full of them.

[msnman]

The wow signal it was sent by the trooptonians of the planet ogre

[_FyldeFlyer]

The Wow! signal is one of: a hoax, an unknown natural phenomena, a system glitch or an ETI transmission.

[yjy]

글쎄 ...그때 당시 저기 연구진들이 예산을 넉넉히 안정적으로 타기위해서였거나 아님 정치적이유였거나해서 대중으로부터 관심을 끌기위해 조작한걸수도 있다고 생각한다.

[tatum]

I thought this was debunked a few years ago?