The Wow Signal

In 1997, researchers at Ohio State University detected an extraordinary signal from space. Could it have been a message from another civilization? Tune in as Allison and Robert break down the science behind the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
Works dot com. Hey, Robert, I want to hear science joke.
Give me with it. Nature's oxide walks up to Gold said, hey,

(00:22):
you want to go speak carbon and oh Gold says,
I just love it. That was a good one to
get to the elements with that chow. Yeah, we're gonna
have to do a podcast on the periodic table, I
think one of these days. Yeah, I think we had
a request for it. Um, and that comes to it.
That joke comes to us a compliments of Facebook, Zach,

(00:44):
and you can send us all your bad jokes. We
love them clearly. Um on Facebook, we're stuff from the
Science Lab, or you can always tweet us your bad
jokes too, were lab stuff over on Twitter. But to
get away from the periodic table today, we're talking about
STI again and in particular one when one event in
SETI that you guys may be familiar with. Yeah, we're

(01:05):
talking about the Wow signal here, right. Yeah. So I
was inspired to do this podcast because there's a pretty
cool event that happened in August called set Con and
this was convention, right yes, and Comic Con, which you
were just tweating about the other day. So it was
organized by the folks at the seti Into Institute and
that's one of the really the big ones, the big

(01:27):
cohunas when it comes to study. You know, you have
people like Frank Drake there, he of the Drake equation,
Jilt Tarter, she was of course the model for Jodie
Foster's character in Contact Um. Seth show Stack is one
of their big people there are one of their big researchers,
and so they had some pretty cool events. But there
was an interesting debate that arose out of set Con.

(01:48):
And we've covered this before. Yeah, most of this, uh
comes out of some stuff that Stephen Hawkings said in
the recent and I think I've been saying already, but
but then he said it on a Discovery documentary series
about the universe, Stephen Hawkings Universe, and uh so suddenly
I think it was like like I said, I think
it was one of those newsweeks for there wasn't much

(02:09):
to report yet. We hadn't had an oil spill um
that was like a week off. So they're like, whoa
Stephen Hawking is saying that aliens want to destroy us.
Let's uh, let's you know, sex up the headlines and
uh and and have a field day with this. So
you guys might remember we did a podcast that covered
some of this ground. And right like Roberts saying it
was just hawking, was theorizing, well, yeah, if there's intelligent

(02:31):
life out there, maybe these life forms might be inclined
to harm us and take theirs. Yes. His whole thing
was like, we we are the model that we by
which we can try and understand what alien life we
consist of. And if there anything like us, there probably
kind of jerks, so maybe we shouldn't meet them. I mean,
that was essentially it. I mean it was. It's kind

(02:52):
of blee. He makes it a lot more elegantly than
I did. But that was it. But you know, I
mean I'm not indeed he does he did it? Did
them justice? You did talking justice? Um. So the debate
that is coming from this convention and that we've had
all along is do we actively try to communicate with
extraterrestrial intelligence? What's the benefit? Yeah, like, are they what

(03:12):
are they gonna come? And do they're gonna come and
share their technology with us and and you know, be
super beneficial or or are they going to conquerss I
guess the I deal. I mean a lot of it
is just based in curiosity. You know, the universe is vast,
it you know, spans essentially forever as far as our
minds can understand it or grasp it, you know, and

(03:32):
so what's out there? You know, Well, curiosity of course
being the predecessor of innovation and exploration all those good
ations that we like to do, and that advanced our
civilization too. Yeah. So if they have the technology to
receive our message, you know, for actively broadcasting one of
those foolish things like did you hear about the instance
where that social networking site Bibo sending hundreds of user

(03:55):
generated text messages and um pictures and all this stuff. Yeah,
that was They covered that in this American Life of Contact. Yeah,
and there's just all sorts of idiotic things being sent
out there. They were basically like some heartfelt things. It
wasn't all idiotic, but a lot of kind of silly
things that were being beamed to a planet twenty light
years away, an extra planet. Yeah. Maybe maybe it's because

(04:18):
I like to think maybe it's kind of like a
conspiracy theory thing. I mean, it's kind of like the
the NASA who ever found out that there's that there's
some danger over there, there's some sort of like horrible
intergalactic civilization. They're like, whoa, We've got to convince them
that we're really dumb, because otherwise it's gonna come and
harvest our brains. So let's let's hook them up to
our social networking. You know, they're trying to think them out.

(04:38):
Interesting my theory because earlier, you know, the earlier method,
like with the voyager missions and all, was to you know,
a send naked pictures of ourselves, but also you know,
be like, look at us, we understand math and and
you know that we have this grasp of science, and
trying to convey that we're we're nice, upstanding members of
the neighborhood and that we should be invited over to

(05:00):
dinner sometime. You know that kind of thing. Yeah, so,
whatever your stance is on sending messages, we really have
been sending messages indirectly pretty much ever since TVs and
radios have been around, Right, Yeah, it's kind of like
we've in um in contrast to like sending out a
polite message to the neighbors, It's like we've had our
windows open with the TV blaring literally with the TV

(05:24):
for forty years, and now the neighbor is finally coming
over and being a pan of brownies and you know
some music. Yeah, there's actually there's a great Futurama episode
where the aliens come to invade because there they've been
like this takes place, you know, like far in the future.
So they're just now watching an Ally McBeal esque show

(05:44):
and can you just mentioned Ally mcnel? I forget it
was called like single Female Lawyer or something. So suddenly
they're signing there there the signals is interrupted, and they're like,
what happened to the rest of on the rest of
the series, And so they come to invade Earth because
they want to find out how the series ended. So
let's do a quick reminder. I know you guys know this,
but of how we conduct set on Earth, the search

(06:05):
for extraterrestrial intelligence, it's pretty simple. Basically, we just listen
and we watch. And this is interesting and that there
is a lot of argument out there over whether we're
listening and watching for the right stuff. Our method so
far has really been to concentrate on collecting the radio
waves emanating from space. Yeah, we often use radio signals
as a as a benchmark for a civilization's technological achievement. Right,

(06:31):
So there are some people like cosmologists Paul Davies who
are saying, hey, maybe we should be checking out some pulsars.
Maybe there's some civilizations out there saying, listen that pulsar.
We're making it flash like a beacon. How come the
civilization isn't getting it? It's so obvious. Yeah, that would
be like a type two civilization or or type three.

(06:51):
So we look and we listen, and we're basically listening
by eavesdropping on any radio communications coming from beyond Earth. Yeah,
we're trying to hear their TV show, is there lawyer
shows from some distant point in their past. So the
basic instrument going on here is a radio telescope in
the search for steady. It collects radio waves from space,
and because the cosmic radio waves are weak, the telescope

(07:14):
collecting dishes are are really large. And you guys know
this if you've seen are Cibo and Puerto Rico, or
pictures of the now defunct Bigger in Ohio, and it's
actually bigger that we're going to be talking about today.
These things look more like landscape and then something we've built,
you know, it's like just huge, huge telescopes. Yeah, yeah,
and they can survey these enormous chunks of the sky,

(07:36):
one of like these large chunks of the sky one
at a time, those chunks for signals, you can take
this sort of wide field approach and it lets the
telescope cover the entire sky out of low resolution in
a short period of time. So you're packing all this
information and but you know what, you're not getting particularly
quality information. So you do pick up the signal, well,
you're not going to know precisely where it was without

(07:58):
a high resolution arch and then you know what, what
if it doesn't repeat right, then you can't because that's
like we were talking earlier. Repetition is I mean, it's
key in science. And I hear heard something interesting, I
want to hear it again so that I can start
analyzing it. And you can also do a targeted search,
right yeah, and this is uh, focusing on a limited

(08:19):
number like one thousand to two thousand of the sun
like stars out there for extraterrestrial signals. Targeted search allows
for a more detailed investigation of a small area that
we think might be probable location so in in other words,
it's it's it's like it's sounds a targeted search instead
of a wide search. It'sn't like you know, there's it's

(08:40):
like when the police decide to search an individual house
instead of canvassing the neighborhood. Yeah, because they already have
some suspects in mind. Yeah, yeah, they have some intel
that they're going on. So and the idea here is
we have we might have intel to go on because
we're saying, oh, well, this particular uh section has the
potential more of a potential to have a planet and

(09:00):
life could have evolved on than this like empty area blackness.
And another thing to bring to the table is that
our knowledge of exoplanets out there is growing every day.
I mean we know of hundreds yeah, so yeah, the
intelligence is improving, so we're getting a better idea of
where we should be aiming these targeted searches. And in fact,
that's what Kepler has been out there doing, to a

(09:21):
hardworking Kepler. So today we're pretty much interested in one
particular radio telescope by the name of Bigger. Bigger is
pretty famous as far as radio telescope scale. That sounds
kind of funny, Yeah, like I was trying to imagine
like like one of those teenage magazines that you see
in the grocery store, and they'd be like the cover
is like something about like the heart Throb and then
like top ten radio telescopes and like teenagers are going

(09:44):
crazy for him. Right, So Vigier was in Ohio, was
Ohio State University Radio Telescope. And to paraphrase one of
our old freelance writers, Susan Nasser who wrote about Figure,
but he looked kind of like a shiny parking lot.
It had a wall that was sitting on either end,
and there's one all that one wall that faced the sky.

(10:06):
Chick collect these radio waves and the waves then traveled
over the ground, which was covered with a sheet of
aluminum to preserve the signal as block interference, good stuff
like that, And then they traveled to the other wall,
which was curved, and it sent the waves to receiver
and eventually all that handy information wound up being printed
out at a computer. Yeah, they're kind of big eyes source,
but they kind of have to be to do well.

(10:28):
So it's kind of sad Bigger is no longer there. Bigger, Uh.
It went online in nineteen in nineteen seventy three it
began searching for radio signals. But since Bigger has been
in service, it has now gone defunct, and I believe
it has been replaced by a development of residential development
in Ohio, which I think is really sad. It would
have been more ironic if you have been replaced by

(10:50):
a parking lot. So yeah, nine seventy three, Bigger begins
its work. It's it's very serious, steady work, and one night,
a couple of years later, we get something pretty interesting
going on. Yeah, this was back in August, more than
thirty years ago. It's a hot summer night. Yeah. They
had big Ear aimed basically just just scan the Milky

(11:13):
Way for some sort of a signal, and uh it
got one, um, a really strong signal yeah. Um, and
it was long too, one minute twelve seconds. Yeah, it's
for the For the one minute and twelve seconds, the
waves were in the telescope search being the signal was strong.
It ranged from five to thirty times the background radio

(11:34):
noise that radio telescopes regularly to pick up. So that's
an interesting thing to note. Right, there's a lot of
spaces in noisy place. Um, and there's a little bit
of a window that you can listen for. And so
this was stronger than the background noise out there. So
that was pretty interesting. Yeah, the signal was amazing, and
uh so of course we kept searching for it. Like
I said, repetition, we wanted to hear it again. We

(11:56):
didn't hear it again. We have never heard it again. Yeah,
that's left in the case with these signals and and
the Wow signal as this would soon be called because
days later professor at an Ohio State, a guy by
the name of Jerry Emon or Emmin, he saw the
print out from Big Ears computer. There's no one around
to tell to talk to poor Jerry, and he circled
the sequence from the night Big Ear picked up this
unusual signal and he wrote wow exclamation point. And so

(12:23):
professor was teaching Astronomy and Electrical Engineering os U. He'd
worked on Big Ears project. In fact, you're so devoted
to Big Ear and the telescope's work that after funding
was slashed and he was like, oh, he came back
as a volunteer. Wow, because he's kind of like that
dude who like, you know, it's like you see a
ghost or something for you know, and then you're like,
you spend the rest of your life sort of like

(12:44):
trying to figure out what the world that was. Yeah,
well I think he has in this case. I really
think he has, because the Wild signal is huge. I mean,
why was it so huge, why was it so remarkable,
and why couldn't have just been some object in space?
Because we know that there are a lot of natural
objects like stars and black holes and these emit radio waves.
But on wow is line of sight in the sky,

(13:05):
there were no astronomical sources of radio waves at all.
So WOW did hail from a spot near Sagittarius A,
which is a pretty big source of radio waves at
the center of our galaxy. But wow is line of
sight that night in the sky, it didn't match up.
It traced to a different line of sight than this region.
And so really the conclusion that we drew was, of

(13:26):
all the sources known at the time, WOW did not
seem to come from a natural object in space, which
would mean it's uh, It's like Sherlock Holmes said, right,
once you've ruled out all the natural, then you have
to worry about the unnatural. Yeah, yeah, well yeah, or aliens.
But yeah, first us could it have been US. Um okay, well,

(13:47):
so yeah, interesting the radio signals narrow band, meaning it
range over a few frequencies, unlike most of the natural
radio sources in space, whose emissions tend to range over
a huge number of frequencies. And yeah, like you were
just saying it have come from US. Yeah, we sent
a lot of stuff into space, So there is the
argument that that it could have come from some sort

(14:08):
of you know, Earth produced instrument, A circling satellite on
a probe, you know, on a program course through the space,
could have sent the radio waves. Has it sent it
back to Earth? Um? Well, no, The Big Air Group
was good. They did their homework, They did their due diligence.
They checked their lists for instruments in space at the time,
because it would have been disappointing if they were like, oh,

(14:29):
that was just something bouncing off of a satellite and
it would that would have made kind of sense, you know. Well,
they didn't find any. They checked their lists for all
these instruments. They didn't find any that were in Wild's
line of sight. They made a couple of calls, seriously,
if they missed something. Nothing turned up. Besides that, we
usually sent instruments to investigate moons and planets in our
solar system, and the signal came from a plane apart

(14:51):
from that plane, which I realized it's kind of tricky,
but it wasn't. It wasn't. Again, it's it's not if
it's bouncing off of something, as not bouncing off of
anything that we sent up. So then again you also
have the fact that man made transmissions weren't allowed at
the cimeter radio wavelength that figure was listening to, right,
So not only is there something weird out there making

(15:12):
radio waves, but it's breaking the law. It's breaking the law.
And then, like Robert was saying, just a little bit ago,
there's this later idea that was floated that maybe, in fact,
the wild signal was a radio wave sent from Earth
that ransom space debree got reflected back. But again they
ruled it out. They thought that the pattern didn't quite
seem to match up for that scenario, which really is

(15:32):
of course extraterrestrials. Yeah, when you rule out all the
other scenarios, like you're saying, yeah, then you just go
with the the unnatural and it's and so, yeah, we
haven't had any kind of repetition on this, So it's
it continues to be a mystery and people continue to
throw out the theories, and he knows it maybe maybe
one of those things that will never really have a
firm answer too. And the wild signal is by far

(15:56):
not the only signal that we've never been able to explain.
The vaunted a study researcher Paul Horowitz who works out
of Harvard because picked up legend goes thirty seven signals
that he was never able to explain much in the
way that we dismissed all of these factors as causing
the Wow signal. He's done the same in a in
an old paper. So the signals are out there and now,

(16:21):
and then there's also glupe right, oh glup. Yeah, Strickland
strictly wanted us to mention this one and this isn't
so much an extraterrestrial signal, that this was a funky
signal that was picked up underwater. Yeah, And I think well,
Strickland and other people like to make the claim that
it was the HP Lovecraft creation, the you know, the
the god Cathulu, yes Caul on which we have an article,

(16:44):
by the way, have you read that article? Yeah, I
don't have to. I'm all up on that stuff. That
Cathulo articles really aimed at people who really aren't is
into Lovecraft as I am, like I should read. Well,
my theory is that if the glut signal is Cthula,
it's because Cathula really ticked off at how overblown he's
become in uh in popular culture, and it is particularly

(17:05):
irritated about the plush dolls you can buy. Right, So
the gloop signal was picked up by one of the
booty's out there, placed I think by a naval body,
and it was picked up by the sonar equipment and
it was said to be so deep and that it
could not have been produced by any animal that we

(17:26):
know of. Okay, fine, it was an animal produced. Well,
maybe it was produced by something some rumblings within the
inner Earth. Yeah, there's a lot in the inner Earth
that we we don't completely understand. So that's completely feasible. Yeah,
so that's gloup for you, strick or ancient you know,
squid god living on the bottom of the ocean. Very scientific.
But here's another Lovecraft connection. Maybe the whole signal is

(17:47):
actually as is off. Yeah, So what do you guys
think these signals are. We're always putting the call out
to write in and tell us your thoughts. We'd like
to hear you think about Wow. Yeah, and uh point
here at it. Yeah. Check out our checks out on
Facebook where we're Stuff in the Science Lab, or on
Twitter where we're lab Stuff. Um, we'll update you with
all the stuff we're writing about and uh podcasting about. Hey.

(18:08):
So we'd love to hear what you guys think of
the Wow signal and other city phenomena out there, So
send us an email it science stuff at how stuff
wrix dot com. Yeah, and be sure to check out
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And there's always how stuff works dot com where Cfolo

(18:29):
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