Wow! signal received - August 15, 1977

On this day in 1977, the radio telescope Big Ear recieved the Wow! signal, which many people believed to be a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hi, I'm Eves, and Welcome to This Day
in History Class, a show that uncovers history one day
at a time. Today is August. The day was August

(00:25):
nineteen seventy seven, the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio
State University received a signal that seemed like it may
have had an extraterrestrial origin. In nineteen fifty nine, Cornell
University scientists Philip Morrison and Jiuzeppe Colconi published a paper
in Nature called Searching for Interstellar Communications. In the paper,

(00:50):
the scientists proposed that extraterrestrial beings trying to communicate with
Earth might do so using radio signals. Further, it was
likely that they would communicate at a frequency of fourteen
twenty mega hurts Hydrogen, the most common chemical element in
the universe, amidst photons at this frequency. The quiet band

(01:14):
of the electromagnetic spectrum between fourteen twenty mega hurts and
sixteen seventy megaheurts later became known as the water hole,
a place where extraterrestrials may be likely to communicate. The
search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, has been happening ever
since radio technology began developing, but the modern search was

(01:35):
born in nineteen sixty with Project Osma, when astronomer Frank
Drake used a radio telescope to examine stars in the
water hole. In nineteen seventy three, scientists at Ohio State
University began using a radio telescope named big Ear to
search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Around eleven sixteen pm Eastern daylight

(01:59):
time in August fift nineteen seventy seven, Big Air got
a narrow band foot signal that lasted seventy two seconds.
The signals seemed to come from the constellation Sagittarius. It
was about thirty times stronger than the cosmic background noise,
and it was at a frequency of about fourteen twenty

(02:19):
mega hurts. The signal went unnoticed until a few days later,
when astronomer Jerry Aman was reviewing the computer print out
and noticed the sequence six e q U J five
among a sea of low numbers that represent background noise.
He used a red pen to circle the sequence and

(02:40):
wrote wow in the left margin of the print out.
That's how it became known as the WOW signal. People
began pointing to the signal as evidence of extraterrestrial life.
Scientists determined that nothing in the Sagittarius constellation could have
made the signal, and that it was not a satellite transmission,

(03:02):
military signal, aircraft signal, or broadcast beam, and scientists conducted
follow up searches for decades. Astronomer Robert Gray has searched
for recurrences of the wild signal. He did sell at
oak Ridge Observatory in Massachusetts, at the Mount Pleasant Radio
Observatory in Tasmania, and at the Very Large Array Radio

(03:25):
Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico, but the signal has never repeated.
The Big Ear Observatory was disassembled in n but the
search for extraterrestrial intelligence continues today. In researchers suggested that
the signal was not a sign of extraterrestrial life, but

(03:46):
a signal generated by a passing comment that was not
cataloged at the time, but many astronomers do not agree
with this theory. Exactly where the signal came from remains unexplained.
I'm each death Cote and hopefully you know a little
more about history today than you did yesterday. Get more
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(04:11):
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