WOW! Signal was faster and stronger: Scientists know where the mysterious wave came from...well, almost

The WOW! Signal, seen as the very first extraterrestrial communication at the time, could soon be solved. Scientists have, for now, partially decoded where it came from and upped its intensity based on further calculations and using data from 1977. According to new research, the WOW! Signal was much more stronger than previously thought. It also seems to have originated from somewhere in the Milky Way. However, researchers are still not sure of the source. The findings are currently available on the preprint server arXiv. The Astrophysical Journal would be peer reviewing it post-submission, providing new insights into the most mysterious signal ever detected from space.

Also Read: 44 minutes apart, 2 minutes every time: Something from deep space is sending signals to Earth

Big Ear Observatory in Delaware, Ohio, where the signal was detected by SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) astronomer Jerry R. Ehman, is no longer functioning. However, data on the signal running into thousands of pages was preserved and accessed by the researchers from the Arecibo Wow! (AWOW) project at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. They went through over 75,000 pages of original data, carrying out an in-depth computational analysis for the first time. This threw up some never-before-seen results, particularly on three things about the WOW! Signal - origin, intensity, and frequency.

Also Read: Move aside Mars, Ceres was once hot and alive, and hosted life in our solar system

Fresh details on WOW! Signal

The analysis showed that the WOW! Signal was four times stronger than previous estimates. Also known as flux density, in scientific terms, it stood at 250 Janskys, while till now it was believed to be somewhere between 54 and 212 Janskys. This considerably changes the view on the WOW! Signal and what triggered it. The study led by Abel Méndez also narrowed down the region from which it could have originated. They are sure that the signal did not originate in deep space, and instead came from a source within our galaxy. The source was also spinning much faster than estimated, thus changing its frequency. While earlier estimates put the frequency at 1420.4556 MHz, the new findings peg it at 1420.726 MHz. Méndez says even though it looks tiny, it is a huge change. The source would have to be spinning rapidly faster to create that much of a frequency difference, the researchers said.

When Ehman detected the WOW! Signal on August 15, 1977, he was caught by surprise and wrote down the word "WOW" next to it, which became the radio signal's namesake. Scientists were intrigued and believed it came from an extraterrestrial source. But the alien theory did not pan out and astronomers have been sure that it was some sort of cosmic phenomenon, such as the sudden brightening of a cold hydrogen cloud. The mystery of the WOW! Signal is yet to be fully unravelled as scientists plan on continuing their research to pinpoint the exact source of the nearly 50-year-old radio signal.