The mystery of the Wow! signal has been solved! скачать в хорошем качестве

The mystery of the Wow! signal has been solved!

We have received countless unexplained signals from space. However, only one of them has been able to make astronomers exclaim "Wow!" This "Wow!" eventually became the name of the signal. Since then, this amazing message from the heavens has sparked both hope and frustration over the years. Every time scientists thought they had "decoded the signal", they would eventually realize they were "wrong". But this time, it seems that there has finally been a breakthrough. So who sent this signal? Was it some mysterious force of nature? Aliens? How was the Wow signal received? To understand this, let's go back to the beginning of this fascinating story. And it is not a short story. It has been unfolding for half a century! During this time, astronomers have discovered more than 5,500 exoplanets, photographed a black hole, detected gravitational waves and revealed many other surprising facts about the universe. However, when it came to this signal, they had nothing but disappointment! Why is that? In 1977, a strange signal was detected by the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University. One day, while conducting an all-night observation at the observatory, Professor Jerry Ehman was surprised to detect a mysterious radio signal emitted by the computer. What kind of news reached the scientists? Could it be a signal coming from aliens? If it were true, what would it say? Maybe something like "We'd like to visit, but there's a lot of space junk in Earth's orbit and it's getting in our way"? Of course, that's just a joke. However, we'll talk about aliens and space junk later. What really caught Professor Ehman's attention was the string of characters "6EQUJ5" found in the computer's analysis. It wasn't a random string of numbers and letters. It was a measure of the intensity of the signals detected by the radio telescope in space. Hypotheses Despite spending all their time, the only progress the researchers made was to formulate numerous hypotheses about what the Wow signal could be. And, of course, this could not be discussed without considering the existence of aliens. This theory had its foundations. The signal was narrowband. According to the researchers, this is exactly what an extraterrestrial civilization would do. To generate narrowband signals, advanced electronic equipment is required. In addition, it is much more economical. This is because covering a wide range of frequencies consumes a huge amount of energy. The Wow signal was also transmitted in the frequency range of neutral hydrogen. This is the most abundant element in nature. For this reason, astronomers believe that "any extraterrestrial civilization that wanted to send a message to communicate would probably use this frequency." In addition, this frequency has little noise and almost no natural signals occur at it. Therefore, the probability of a message coming from space being confused with natural signals would be much lower. However, the involvement of aliens has not been properly explained. In the meantime, another theory has emerged that suggests that the signal may have originated from something artificial. However, surprisingly, this theory did not focus on advanced civilizations in the universe, but rather on a much more mundane problem: space junk. It could be that the Wow signal was transmitted by ordinary trash literally piling up in Earth's orbit! A new explanation According to astronomers, the main reason for the difficulties lies in the uniqueness of this signal. The signal was picked up only once and has never been detected again. Let's compare it to "Tabby's Star". This star has periodic oscillations in its brightness, which decrease and return to normal. There is a theory that some civilization is extracting energy from this star. Since this phenomenon repeats itself, it is possible to investigate it several times. But in the case of the Wow signal, astronomers have only one sequence of characters received in a single observation. They extracted as much as they could from this data, but they did not obtain any conclusive results! In view of this, the scientists decided to change their approach and began to look for anything that had any similarity to the Wow signal. To do this, they used data from the Arecibo radio telescope, which is 300 meters in diameter and much more powerful than the Big Ear. The researchers analyzed the records of the Arecibo telescope between 2017 and 2020. And, surprisingly, they identified some signals similar to the Wow signal in the same region of the sky! These signals were also narrowband and were picked up at frequencies close to the neutral hydrogen line. The origin of these signals was associated with a cloud of neutral hydrogen in the region. Of course, there are differences. The signals discovered by the team of astronomers were significantly weaker than the Wow signal and emitted from scattered locations.