Scientist estimates interstellar object 3I/Atlas beamed the Wow! Signal 48 years ago - 'How powerful was...'
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "Scientist estimates interstellar object 3I/Atlas beamed the Wow! Signal 48 years ago - 'How powerful was...'")
Did 3I/Atlas send the Wow! Signal? Scientist says there is a chance it did. Photograph: (Gemini Telescope Chile)
Was the Wow! Signal emitted by interstellar comet 3I/Atlas? A scientist says the comet is travelling from the same place in space from where the Wow! Signal originated. He says the chance of this happening is extremely tiny.
Interstellar comet 3I/Atlas was the likely origin point of the famous Wow! Signal detected in 1977, according to Harvard scientist Avi Loeb. In a new blog post, he pointed to the probability that the signal was sent by the interstellar object 48 years ago. He listed a series of calculations to deduce the position of 3I/Atlas in 1977, right about the time the Wow! Signal reached Earth originating in a far-off location. Loeb concluded that the two points in space are quite near, which means the chances of something else transmitting the signal were minuscule. "The ‘Wow! Signal’ originated from the sky coordinates of Right Ascension (RA)=19h25m=291 degrees and Declination (Dec)=-27 degrees," he wrote. The signal believed to have come from an extraterrestrial object at the time was recorded on August 15, 1977. At this time, the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS was at a distance of "about 600 times the Earth-Sun separation (AU)."
When was Wow! Signal detected?
He deduced that the "Wow! Signal was separated by approximately 4 degrees in RA and 8 degrees in Dec from the direction of 3I/ATLAS." Loeb added that the "chance of two random directions in the sky being aligned to that level is about 0.6 per cent," which means it is possible that 3I/Atlas emitted the Wow Signal. If this is the case, then it raises another question: "How powerful was the transmitter?" The Wow! Signal was detected by SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) astronomer Jerry R. Ehman. He was using the Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope when a sudden signal stumped him. It was such a strange occurrence that he simply wrote the words "Wow" on a piece of paper, which was later used to name the strange signal. Also Read: Astronomers may have solved the mystery of WOW! signal nearly 50 years later
The Wow! Signal remains unexplained to date. Scientists have been racking their brains for answers for decades, but the signal remains an anomaly. A few weeks ago, a study claimed that the Wow! Signal was much stronger than previously thought, and it seems to have originated from somewhere in the Milky Way. The intensity of the “Wow! Signal” is reported to be in the range of 54–212 Jansky with a bandwidth of about 10 kilohertz, which Loeb says "corresponds to a source power of 0.5–2 gigawatts, the output of a typical nuclear reactor on Earth." Also Read: 44 minutes apart, 2 minutes every time: Something from deep space is sending signals to Earth
Loeb further deduced that the direction of both the Wow! Signal and 3I/Atlas are pretty much the same, and hopes that the "coincidence in the arrival direction of 3I/ATLAS and the Wow! Signal" will prompt research into whether 3I/ATLAS shows any radio transmission.
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Where is 3I/Atlas? Speed of 3I/Atlas
3I/Atlas is pacing at a speed of 221,000 km/hr, or 60,000 km/s. The alien comet will come near Mars in the next few days, and on October 3, the CaSSIS camera onboard ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and the Mars Express’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) will be ready to take pictures of this alien comet.
