Astronomers may have solved the mystery of WOW! signal nearly 50 years later

Scientists recorded a strange signal from space in 1977. It was captured by the Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope and no viable explanation has been presented for it. What was it? Where did it come from? These questions continue to stump scientists.

The WOW signal was a 72-second burst, and it was so strange that astronomer Jerry Ehman wrote 'WOW!' on the telescope's readout. People wondered whether an alien civilisation was trying to make contact with Earth.

However, a fresh explanation for the WOW! signal has been put forward by experts. According to a new analysis by scientists from the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, the WOW! signal does not hint at the existence of alien life.

They say that it was probably caused by an extremely powerful laser slamming into Earth. This happened when a rare alignment happened between a collapsed star and a cloud of cool hydrogen.

Professor Abel Méndez and his team say that they have identified a series of similar signals which can explain where the WOW! signal came from. They went through archived data from the Arecibo Observatory's Radio Emissions from Red Dwarf Stars (REDS) project. It had a similar experimental set-up to the Big Ear radio telescope. This prompted the team to assume that it also likely caught a signal like the WOW! signal in the past.

The data showed that several extremely similar but faint signals had appeared. Four of the signals came from a tiny red dwarf star called Teegarden's Star located 12.5 light-years away.

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It is surrounded by clouds of cool atomic hydrogen and when intense light from the red dwarf hits them, a powerful burst of microwave energy in the 1420 MHz is produced, the researchers said.

This results in a natural microwave laser which is extremely similar to the WOW! signal. The scientists say that the WOW! signal likely happened as a result of a more powerful burst of energy which collided with a hydrogen cloud. This resulted in the production of a much bigger microwave laser.

What happened when WOW! signal was detected

The WOW! signal sent waves of excitement in the scientific community when it hit in 1977. It was seen as the first Hello from an alien civilisation. It was extremely powerful and arrived in an unusually narrow band of frequencies at around 1420 MHz. Since similar frequencies are produced by atomic hydrogen, scientists theorised that aliens are likely using the abundant hydrogen in space to send a signal to other civilisations that might be present in the universe.