The infamous signal commonly referred to as the Wow! Signal may have emanated from the constellation Sagittarius, new findings suggest. The Wow! Signal, first detected on Aug. 15, 1977 appears to have come from a sun-like star approximately 1,800 light-years away.
"The Wow! Signal is considered the best SETI candidate radio signal that we have picked up with our telescopes," Alberto Caballero, an amateur astronomer, told Live Science.
According to NASA, SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has been listening for possible transmissions from faraway technological creatures since the mid-twentieth century.
The Wow! first appeared during a SETI search at Ohio State University's Big Ear telescope. According to a paper prepared by its discoverer, astronomer Jerry Ehman, in honor of its 30th anniversary, the signal was extremely strong but fleeting, lasting only 1 minute and 12 seconds.
Ehman scribbled "Wow!" on the page after witnessing a printout of an aberrant signal, giving the event its name. The now-decommissioned Big Ear telescope searched for communications in the 1420.4056 megahertz electromagnetic frequency spectrum, which is created by hydrogen.
According to the American Astronomical Society's history, researchers have since sought for follow-ups emanating from the same location, but they have come up empty. The Wow! Caballero told Live Science that the signal was most likely caused by a natural event rather than aliens, however astronomers have ruled out a few plausible causes, such as a passing comet. Caballero did add, however, that in our few attempts to communicate with ET, humans have largely created one-time broadcasts, such as the Arecibo message launched toward the globular star cluster M13 in 1974. The Wow! Signal, he noted, could have been something similar.
Caballero decided to check a catalog of stars from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite for probable possibilities after learning that the Big Ear telescope's two receivers were facing in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius on the night of the Wow Signal.
"I found specifically one sun-like star," he said, an object designated 2MASS 19281982-2640123 about 1,800 light-years away that has a temperature, diameter and luminosity almost identical to our own stellar companion. Caballero's findings appeared May 6 in the International Journal of Astrobiology.
While living organisms may exist in a wide variety of environments around stars quite dissimilar to our own, he chose to focus on sun-like stars because "we're looking for life as we know it." Given his results, he thinks it "could be a good idea to search [the star] for habitable planets, and even civilizations."
