The most promising alien signal turned out to be of natural origin

For almost half a century, scientists have been tormented by the mystery of the Wow! signal received on Earth on August 15, 1977. The Big Ear radio telescope in the United States picked up a 72-second radio transmission very similar to a message from another mind. The transmission was never repeated, but nothing similar ever happened again, although hundreds of radio telescopes operate all over the Earth. New work by Puerto Rican scientists using archival data from the collapsed Arecibo radio telescope attributes the signal to “Wow!” nature.

Historical print. Big Ear Radio Observatory and North American AstroPhysical Observatory

Signal “Wow!” was very powerful and came from a space where there were no registered objects. At the same time, the source remained motionless all the time, which excludes its birth in the Solar System. The man-made origin of the signal from interference on Earth was also excluded. Scientists in Puerto Rico set out to sift through archival data from the Arecibo radio telescope to look for similar signatures in other observations, where much weaker but similar signals were indeed found.

Thus, four signals with a similar structure at the frequency of neutral hydrogen at 1420 MHz – the most common substance in the Universe and, therefore, suitable for the role of a universal carrier for interplanetary communication – were discovered in the area of ​​the Teegarden red dwarf close to Earth. This star could not generate such radio signals – it is too weak. But an invisible source of microwave or soft x-ray (or gamma) radiation would be a suitable candidate to excite the signal. And who is hiding in the darkness of space with such capabilities? This is a neutron star, for example, in the form of a magnetar.

After analyzing the data and modeling, scientists put forward a proposal to read the “Wow!” signal. exclusively of natural origin. For its appearance, a combination of rare but absolutely non-zero possibilities was required: a cloud of cold neutral hydrogen, a neutron star behind the cloud, and the direction of the axis of rotation (the axis of jet or radiation emission) towards the Earth. This also explains why we didn’t detect any more similar signals.

The emission of radiation from the neutron star served as a pump for the cloud of neutral hydrogen, which already independently emitted a radio signal. Thus, we witnessed the operation of a naturally occurring hydrogen maser. By the way, for the first time in the history of observations, if the hypothesis of Puerto Rican scientists is confirmed by independent observations. They only managed to process Arecibo data for four months: from February to May 2020. Similar work can be done by teams at other radio observatories. It will be funny if, as a result of searching for natural sources of unusual signals, messages from aliens are discovered. Why not? Life is full of surprises.