Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute Seth Shostak held similar sentiments. “There would have been no hydrogen coma to detect and therefore he could not have seen the comet.” “When he observed the comet it was over four astronomical units from the Sun, which means it would have been effectively inactive,” he told Astronomy Now. “We should have seen the source come through twice in about three minutes: one response lasting 72 seconds and a second response for 72 seconds following within about a minute and a half,” he told Live Science.Įhman said the signal being cut off abruptly was the only reason only one recording was captured, and believe this proves it couldn’t be a comet because it wouldn’t have been possible for it to escape the radio telescope’s field of view that fast.Ĭomet expert Alan Fitzsimmons also disputes the findings, claiming it would have been impossible to record the apparent 1420 MHz signal from 266P/Christensen because it has little activity even when at perihelion - its closest point to the Sun. That answer depends on who you believe, with a number of astronomers rubbishing Paris’ conclusion - even the astronomer who discovered the Wow! signal in 1977 doesn’t believe the paper’s finding.Įhman explained the Big Ear telescope had two “feed horns” to capture slightly different field of views, yet there was only one recorded signal. When 266P/Christensen returned to the same sector of space earlier this year, Paris’ team was able to match its frequency to the same 1420 MHz bandwidth seen with the Wow! signal. The comet, called 266P/Christensen, wasn’t catalogued at the time, although the research suggests its hydrogen clouds were the source of the signal. However, a new scientific paper published in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences claimed to have solved the four decade enigma.Īccording to astronomer Antonio Paris, the bizarre 1420 MHz radio signal could be attributed to a comet that was in the vicinity of the recording back in 1977. The anomaly was then aptly titled the Wow! signal.Īs the signal did not repeat and subsequent attempts to find it were unsuccessful, its origin has remained a mystery for 40 years. While reviewing the recorded data from the radio telescope being used to support the search for extraterrestrial intelligence project, astronomer Jerry Ehman discovered the narrow-bandwidth signal.Įhman was so intrigued by the peculiar discovery, he circled the reading on the computer printout of the data and wrote ‘Wow!’ on the side of the paper. IN 1977, Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope captured a 72 second-long astronomical anomaly that has since been a constant source of speculation among the star gazing community.
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