Scientific American has a new explanation for the famous “Wow!” signal – the orderly burst of focused radio energy recorded in 1977 that seemed like it could possibly have been an alien civilization’s attempt at “hello,” or at least a chance interception of alien Funniest Home Videos reruns. A new analysis of that signal — compared with simultaneous data recorded at the massive Arecibo radio telescope — indicates that it might have been a trace of a dramatic astronomical collision instead:
The latest explanation emerged last week from a trio of astronomers in a preprint that has not yet been subjected to peer review. And sorry, once again, it’s not aliens. The researchers suspect that the Wow! signal was created when a flare from a hypermagnetized, hyperdense star called a magnetar struck a cold interstellar cloud of hydrogen gas. The flare caused the cloud to incandesce in the radio wavelength, and this fast-and-furious outburst was detected by Big Ear.
Lead author Abel Méndez, director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico, for many years dismissed the Wow! signal as a mere instrumental glitch. But after scrutinizing several somewhat Wow!-like signals found unexpectedly in archival data from the late, great Arecibo Observatory, he and his colleagues now suspect that the famous yawp from 1977 was caused by a very rare kind of astrophysical anarchy.
“I would say, wow—I never thought of that. I never thought of the Wow! signal as being real and being produced by some weird astrophysical phenomenon,” Méndez says.
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The researchers’ flare-meets-hydrogen-cloud story is “definitely a bit speculative,” says study co-author Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, a graduate student of astrophysics at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. “We’re not saying that this is definitely the case. We’re saying that it’s a very exciting hypothesis.”
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You can read more of the hydrogen hypothesis here, in the authors’ preprint on arXiv.