Seti wow12/30/2023 ![]() ![]() This was not as far-fetched as it sounds: Gray had considerable experience with electronics, having built radios as a teenager. His first idea was to build his own radio-telescope from scratch, and point it to the celestial coordinates where the signal originated. In the first part of The Elusive Wow Gray tells the story of his 22-year quest for the Wow! signal. He didn’t have to worry about publication counts, grant applications, or review committees, and was free to pursue what he saw as the most important question of all: Are we alone? Not willing to wait for the professionals to get around to it, he came to a decision: He would search for the Wow! signal on his own. They simply have no time for romantic pursuits like a search for aliens.īut as an outsider, Gray was not burdened with the usual pressures of academic life. Once scientists secure a few hours or days on one of those great dishes, they understandably use every minute of it to pursue their own research projects. The reason, he came to realize, is that observing time on the world’s great radio telescopes is a rare and much sought-after commodity. Given the momentous nature of what the Wow! signal could reveal, he expected astronomers to be clamoring for a chance to study it. But he also learned that apart from the Big Ear team’s own sporadic efforts no one else had actually tried to find it again. The discussions convinced him that the Wow! was not a hoax or a case of terrestrial interference, and most likely originated from the stars. He contacted the Ohio team, visited Big Ear, and had long conversations with Jerry Ehman, as well as with Bob Dixon, who was the director of the SETI project, and John Kraus, the telescope’s designer. Gray first heard of the Wow! signal a few years after its detection, and was fascinated by its potential implications. But when it comes to the nuts and bolts of mounting a search for extraterrestrial intelligence, he is as professional as they come. ![]() Gray makes his living as a data analyst, which means that in radio-astronomy he is technically an amateur – in the best sense of the word: one who does his work as a labor of love. Gray is not a professional astronomer, the kind that works in an academic department and receives a steady paycheck from a university or an observatory. No one has spent more time and energy searching for the Wow! signal than Bob Gray, author of The Elusive Wow: Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. But with no follow-up detections there is simply no way to know whether it was truly a signal from the stars. To most SETI scientists the Wow! is the single most intriguing result ever produced by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Even an intermittent signal should be found again eventually, and Big Ear’s team returned to the location in the sky where the Wow! signal originated more than 50 times hoping to catch it. This alone means that it was not a long continuous signal, but an intermittent one. It was received by one of Big Ear’s two beams which follow each other across the sky in close succession, but not by the other. Strong and clear though it was, the Wow! signal disappeared almost as soon as it was found. Ehman circled the sequence and in the margins jotted a pure, barely articulate, expression of wonder: “Wow!” That was the first time the Wow! signal was detected. But when Big Ear volunteer Jerry Ehman looked over the printout a few days later, the sequence recording the signal leaped off the page at him: 6 E Q U J 5. The telescope’s beam silently scanned the skies, the receiver and spectrometer registered and analyzed the data, and a printer rattled in the darkness, recording it all in a continuous stream of numbers and letters. No one was there to receive the signal when it came in. It was exactly what SETI scientists had been waiting for – a seemingly artificial signal from the stars, one that could carry a message from alien beings light-years away. Its middle part lasted 38 seconds – the time it takes Big Ear’s radio band to traverse a single point in the sky – and it landed almost precisely at the frequency at which SETI scientists were hoping to find it: 1420 megahertz, the emission frequency of hydrogen. It came in loud and crisp, reaching at least 30 times the volume of the background noise and occupying a single 10 kilohertz-wide band on the observatory’s receiver. The signal from the stars arrived at the Big Ear radio observatory in Ohio at 11:16 p.m. Gray, The Elusive Wow: Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Chicago: Palmer Square Press, 2011). ![]()
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