Das berüchtigte „Wow!“-Signal, das auf Außerirdische hindeutete, könnte tatsächlich ein außergewöhnlich seltenes kosmisches Ereignis sein

Wow!

Too soon? 🤪

One more thing originally thought to be alien or God, turns out to be natural. Whoddathunkit?

The Wow signal is

> For 1 minute, 12 seconds that night, Big Ear recorded radio waves from near the constellation Sagittarius that were 30 times stronger than the background hum of deep space and were transmitted in a remarkably specific frequency of 1,420 megahertz. Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, naturally emits radio waves at this frequency …

The 1420 MHz frequency can be used to argue for a natural, or an intelligent source for the Wow signal.

> However, nothing like the Wow! signal has ever been detected again, and no known natural phenomenon has been able to convincingly explain it — perhaps until now.

The new, natural explanation is more convincing than aliens, but it is highly speculative.

> the bizarre Wow! signal may actually be a fortuitous detection of an extremely intense flare striking an interstellar cloud of hydrogen gas. A dense, magnetic star known as a magnetar would be the only source capable of emitting such a strong flare, …

> … Méndez and his colleagues arrived at the new hypothesis after they unexpectedly discovered eight Wow!-like signals while scouting through archival data from the now-defunct Arecibo Observatory.

The signals they found were < 100 times weaker than the Wow signal. So many similar signals from different parts of the sky points to natural origins.

> The narrowband trait of the Wow! signal suggests humankind’s radio interference is the more likely explanation, Yvette Cendes, a radio astronomer at the University of Oregon who was not involved with the new study, told Scientific American.

It is part of the nature of science that some questions are not immediately and obviously settled. We still don’t know what caused the Wow signal. More research needs to be done to confirm that there are other examples of this type of signal. More research needs to be done into the theoretical mechanism of generating the signal.

This information is very impressive indeed but I’m not really sold one way or another. The incredibly unique strength of Wow! is one aspect. I do think this is probably the most likely natural explanation so far, but we need a lot more evidence before declaring it to be the one.