The Wow! Signal with Discoverer Dr. Jerry Ehman

the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has gone on for decades now to no avail and while it's true that the galaxy is enormous and indeed we have barely looked what is clear is that alien civilizations aren't very obvious we do not see them every day except perhaps one day over 40 years ago or we might have on August 15 1977 at Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope a signal was detected very close to the 1420 megahertz hydrogen line the frequency in which neutral hydrogen emits radio in nature and a marker for where to locate and send a signal if you wish to say hello to other civilizations practicing science in the galaxy alien scientists is practicing radio astronomy to would know of the hydrogen line this signal was also a very strong one unusually so and it was narrowband leading my guest who was analyzing the data several days later to famously write the word while on the printout and to this day the WoW signal remains the best candidate for an alien signal received thus far and bares all the expected hallmarks of one in fact it's such a strong candidate it may well have been it welcome to event horizon with John Michael Gaudi a [Music] [Music] in today's episode John is joined by dr. Jerry ehman dr. Eamonn is a retired radio astronomer from Ohio State University he worked with the Big Ear radio Observatory during its SETI survey program for over 30 years on August 15 1977 dr. Eamonn detected the strong narrowband radio signal known as the WoW signal welcome everyone to event horizon with me John Michael Gautier if you enjoy what you hear fall into the event horizon hit the like button and become an active subscriber by ringing the bell dr. Jerry ehman welcome to the program thank you very much happy to be here now dr. you are the person that famously wrote Wow right on the sheet of paper for the WoW signal of 1977 and the still to this day 40 years later this is still an unexplained signal that has no good natural explanation could it be said it could it be said that this is probably the closest we've come to something that might have been might and I stress that work might have been of alien origin yes I agree with that description the signal certainly has characteristics that suggests possible intelligence behind it but of course we were not at the radio Observatory being able to actually definitely prove that it comes from a signal from extraterrestrial civilization on the other hand no scientist or engineer has been able to prove that it isn't from such a civilization so we're left with an interesting possibility so I'm thinking it if this really were a true signal from an extraterrestrial civilization it certainly would be the first one detected but it being a scientist I want proof and in this case proof is basically almost impossible to come by and I'll tell you the reason why back in 1977 we were using technology of the time or maybe of just a few years earlier now remember this was about five years before IBM came out with its personal computer the PC so we were using IBM machine Cauldron 1130 which was a small end mainframe but it didn't have much capability as a matter of fact it had the capability of a Apple 2 computer and the storage capability was only one megabyte 1 million bytes which was this amount that got put on a floppy disk back in those days so and that much storage was available for recording and saving the data so what we had to do was make some compromises when we wrote the computer program to display the results on the printer now the big year which is the radio telescope you were using an Ohio State the big year was originally designed and very successfully to do all sky surveys and create a radio map of the heavens essentially tell us about that what what initially did the the big year find well the big year efforts designed dr. Krim permitted three horns for three different frequency bands one at 612 megahertz one at 1415 megahertz and another one at 2600 megahertz the first and third of those were dispensed with in later years so he stuck with the 1415 megahertz that is we observed over an eight megahertz bandwidth from fourteen eleven to fourteen hundred nineteen megahertz which was just outside the region of neutral hydrogen because we weren't interested in in detecting neutral hydrogen specifically that had been done earlier by other observatories but we were interested in locating discrete sources and identifying the position right Ascension and declination and to coordinates and the signal strength also called flux density and we did that for a total of over 19,000 radio sources so we discovered about half of which had never been detected before by any Observatory we published our results in the astronomical journal in about seven segments over the years and recorded a table of the position and the signal strength and then we had separate contour maps very much like the topographic maps ISTE of their surface and that indicated also the strength of the source the stronger the source the more contours that were shown so that became a major program for us and during the process of measuring resources we found using other data as well that some sources had an unusual spectrum that is the the strength as a function of frequency turned out to be kind of unusual or unexpected in several cases so we as a group made trips down to National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank West Virginia and use their 300-foot dish and 140 foot dish and we also made a couple trips up to Algonquin Park and Ontario using their 150 foot dish to gather more information of at different frequencies about some of these sources so went beyond our own data and GAD data from other observatories with this all-sky survey this this telescope the Big Ear now a correct me if I'm wrong this was this was designed by dr. John Krauss who was also essentially running the program there for the all-sky survey how did this telescope work what what did it do that was different than a giant dish telescope like what you were talking about bringing Bank okay I'm going to direct you to the homepage of the Big Ear website there's a section with a green background called Big Ear structures comments about the above aerial photograph of the Big Ear radio telescope and a link the link for everybody listening the link will be in the description below right so the link takes us to a page that shows the aerial photograph of the Big Ear and I programmed in seven hotspots where if you put a cursor out of your computer on say the ground plane this flat section between the the two reflectors a screen comes up and gives a description of the ground plane and some photographs and that can be done for a total of seven spots one for the flat reflector one for the parabolic or paraboloidal reflector it's a South End the ground plane the horns that collect the energy that are reflected off the telescope and the building that was our main Center for conducting medians and another hello another one that a little building that has a Seattle I like instrument that is used to set the declination of the plant reflector or the telescope as a whole a turntable that was used for antenna testing so all of these seven spots you can see photographs and read a description of what's happening so the basic design involved a flat reflector that was tilde ball originally it was 250 feet wide later expanded to 340 feet wide with it two extra sections at each end these slant Heights was a hundred feet then this was filled Apple one Bay at a time that is one section at a time but they were linked together so one could only make small movements of one section before he had to move the next section over so originally there were seven sections or seven bays and later on two more were added so that made nine the signal from the north-south line called the Meridian would come in and the signal would be reflected off the flat reflector which was actually a mirror to radio waves go across the ground plane and be reflected off the curved paraboloidal mirror and then that focused the signal into two horns that were side-by-side so we actually got two signals about a minute and a half apart as the earth rotation carried the radio telescope beam across the sky and then this the radio signal would be converted to a small electrical current or voltage set down into the receiver that amplified many millions of times and then a computer well the signal would be analyzed actually digitized and then the computer would pick up that digital signal and reported on computer printouts or on a back in the early days a strip chart recorder to get the total signal strength over the band of frequencies and we were observing for the most part between fourteen hundred and eleven and fourteen under nineteen megahertz and eight megahertz bandwidth the larger the bandwidth the the greater the sensitivity I see now you mentioned that you weren't what what they initially with with the Sky Survey part of this they weren't interested in neutral hydrogen now neutral hydrogen is correct me again if I'm wrong that is the 1420 megahertz frequency that the while signal was picked up on so this original all Sky Survey probably wouldn't have seen the WoW signal right that's right now what changed when when you guys started you decided okay we have the the Ohio survey done you know sky surveys done we're going to start looking at that well there was a development before just before the seventh survey was out Jan Krauss was unable to obtain funding to continue the process we had gotten funding from the National Science Foundation and suddenly I believe due to I know don't Ruffus a law or decision by the National Science Foundation probably with the help of US Congress to stop or reduce the amount of money being sent to universities and in favor of sending the money to national facilities like the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank West Virginia fatigue and other and the Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico to fund those more heavily at the if expanse of universities like Ohio State I believe Berkeley that caught in this same process and I think the University of Illinois was another one so some several universities got caught and in our case John Krauss was unable to get sufficient funding so Bob Dixon who was who had become the assistant director of the radio Observatory made a suggestion to John Krauss that we move away from the Ohio Sky Survey which required several people being paid to do the analysis of the data get away from that process and have another observing program observing narrowband signals that could be handled by the computer that didn't require much human analysis actually the only healing we had involved for the most part was them mechanical technician who was on site to keep mechanical things going and we trained him to stop the computer tear off the computer printout and then restart the computer and we could go for three to four days of observing before the computer ran out of space or before we want to change the position of the flat reflector to observe another section of the sky so essentially the Tulsa Quran itself and the technician would check on it every three or four days and restart everything and then drop off of the data printouts to you right yes he took the the printout at that time I had volunteered to look at the computer printouts was the condition that they be delivered to my home this mechanical technician Mike Chris's name was that's a nickname actually his last name was my so Michael bring me the printout he actually built a little box and painted it white and put the paper inside computer printout inside so it was a protected from the rain and then what I would get home from from teaching I would get out the computer printout and look at it and with my red pants circle interesting numbers strong strong outputs on the printout and and the WoW signal was by far the strongest which is why the word Wow which is why I wrote it because is clearly at that time it was the strongest that I had seen and it turned out that it was in fact the strongest that he ever saw on the computer printout so I I noticed I knew right away we had something very interesting now we'll get directly into the WoW signal and why it was so interesting but we'll need to take a break in the meantime but I'd want to ask you one other question one thing that struck me was how inexpensive the big year was to build I think I read $250,000 initially which would have been in the 1960s so adjusting for inflation it's quite a bit more now but why have why don't we have this capability anymore I know that the original big year was that the land was sold and it was demolished but why why do we not have a successor to this telescope yes John Krauss certainly commented that it was a design that was very relatively inexpensive biggest collecting area for the Bucks and a serve a useful purpose unfortunately there was a major disadvantage of this design in order to move to you had to depend on the Earth's rotation at no big deal and you had to fit the flat reflector to a certain angle and let's three or four days go by to get duplicate or triplicate or quadruply signals from the same portion of the sky in that declination band and then move it move this flat reflector a sixth of the degree which actually moves the beam a third of a degree in the sky so it took years actually to observe the entire sky that was visible about a hundred degrees and declination and so it was a slow process and then also for the sky survey it required a group of folks to do a lot of analysis this was early on and and computers weren't is too advanced that they are these days so it took a lot of effort of individuals to get the data analyzed properly so over time other telescopes simply had more capability those countries or universities have had were able to get more money and more money did come in to to astronomy in later years the other designs were just more capable more flexible you could observe you could scan across a source and get the information about one source in just a few minutes and in contrast to trying to scan the whole sky or much of the sky to locate the sources so the newer radio telescopes were tending to study an individual source or an individual small region of the sky rather than what we were doing was to scan the whole sky visible and see what was there so different different approaches different approaches now one thing with the Sky Survey was that they looked at the Andromeda galaxy and noticed that there were roughly at certain positions there was a kind of radial halo around the galaxy in a certain way can you talk about that yeah I wasn't involved in that that happened before I joined the group but that was actually done by I believe it was done by the previous radio telescope called the 96 helix antenna at 250 megahertz but anyway the Andromeda was galaxy m31 was studied and mapped so I'm trying to think yeah I actually was done before with the previous telescope and then our big year did it as well as one of the first projects it's possible that we are seeing ordinary dust and gas clouds that eventually would collapse to form stars in other words nebulae but unless we are actually seeing neutral hydrogen and I don't and we were should not have been seeing that if we were observing it fourteen hundred and fifteen megahertz as we were doing normally with the big year later on and we have to take a break I'm joined today by dr. Jerry ehman when we get back we will talk in depth about the WoW signal be sure to LIKE subscribe and share the video and now back to John and we're back with dr. Jerry Eamon now dr. the while signal when it was picked up by you know automatically as we were talking about the radio telescope and I assume you got it several days later and you you were looking for the data what was your reaction when you saw that I mean you wrote Wow but what what did you think when you when you actually were writing those words well I I knew we had something special and actually of course so worried Wow is almost self-explanatory something represents something unusual and this was certainly unusual the eye I looked at the set of characters 6eq uj5 and saw that the signal was increasing in strength and then decreasing just like we would expect for a strong source it's being transiting our beam starting out low and strength and then high as it gets centered on the beam and then drops off again so I knew within a few seconds that that this was a very strong signal I also knew it was the strongest I had ever seen and I noticed the course it was appeared in just one channel channel 2 which made it a narrowband signal and so it it fit the concept of a narrowband signal that might be one from an extraterrestrial civilization click and prove it of course and still can't prove it but that's what I was thinking and that was one of the purposes of going to the narrowband survey because we were hoping to to catch a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization the search for extraterrestrial intelligence SETI was one of the goals of going to our narrowband detection survey now the signal being narrowband to start this off that nature does not like to produce narrowband signals it can but it doesn't like to you usually don't see that you see these broadband signals from stars and things like that so when you look for a narrowband signal you're you're looking for technology essentially so could anything in the universe that we know about natural produce a narrowband signal at 1420 megahertz at 1420 megahertz there was an agreement that there would be no transmissions in in that frequency band by any country actually to allow it to be used for receiving only by radio telescopes and so literally some of the signal and I told John Krauss and Bob Dixon about it we had a meeting over John started to look at possible sources that could generate such a signal he looked through satellites and and many other things and planets and so forth couldn't find anything that would account for this signal so it had to be left as an unknown source and of course we don't know the distance either that's the difficulty in radio astronomy is many times you only know the right Ascension and declination that is two angular coordinates in the sky the signal strength but there's normally no way to know the distance now there are our exceptions if you know you're looking at a black hole at the center of our galaxy we know the distance to the center of our galaxy and so forth although black hole would not just be generating narrowband signals anyway so you know we we just couldn't pinpoint what source what optical source we might be dealing with and the other downside was we had dual being reception that is we had two horns side-by-side and the radio source as the Earth's rotation carried the beam across the sky the earth the appears that the sources were moving into one horn and then out of that horn and then into the other horn and then out of that farm and I'm with the dual horn system was set up in such a way that one horn was considered to be positive and the other was considered to be negative that is the signals from the positive horn were kept positive the signals from the other horn called the negative horn were actually subtracted from from the background so we we sort of seen two signals now unfortunately when we wrote the computer program we were trying to get all 50 channel signals being displayed so we had only one print position for each channel so we made the decision actually I did the writing of the program as the top part of the program and I said okay well we'll just take the absolute value of the signal level and that will allow us to capture the signal strength with the coding that I've described in the website in just one position well after the WoW signal came through and we couldn't tell which horn the signal came through it came through only one horn and we don't know which horn that was a little bit frustrating and fortunately Bob Dixon happened to discover or remember I'm not sure which that Fortran the computer programming that much of our observing program was written in had the capability of instead of moving the the printer to the next line it could stay in position move the carriage to the left edge of the paper and then you could send another set of codes for the 50 channels and so we decided that we could place a minus sign if the signal was below zero that is from the negative form and that way a negative signal would appear on the computer printout but we didn't have that at the time the while signal came through so that that happened a few months later I think it was one thing about the signal was that when you guys were setting up your SETI experiment you thought well things move around the galaxy you know things move and Doppler shifts happen and you you get all of this sort of wee changes to the to the what do you receive now you decided to correct for this the local standard of rest and the while signals seem to be corrected for that so that assuming that an alien civilization would correct their signal right signal appeared to be corrected right yeah we yeah Bob Jackson had the idea that we should do that so he put it in the code into the program that would have helped for the various motions the rotation of the earth the revolution of the earth about the Sun the motion of the solar system about the center of the galaxy so that accounting for the Doppler effect for each of those motions we get the signal receiver frequency that we should be looking at for each filter each of the 50 filters to be adjusted for that and so the computer printout had one number that accounted for the frequency of one of the components in the receiving leg so that we know we knew what frequency we were observing in so the signal that that means the signal was accounting for the Galactic standard of rest and the Doppler effect so whoever or whatever the origin of this was was correcting for the motions of the galaxies right well we don't know that I mean the idea was that if face an intelligent civilization were to correct for their Doppler motions and the assumption is that they were civilization within our own galaxy another solar system they would correct to the center of our galaxy as well as their own planet or rotation and revolution about their star and the motion of this their solar system about the center of our galaxy that if they did that we should probably be detecting a signal if they were observing if they were sending it in the middle of the the band that we had we would observe it in the middle well channel two is at the left edge so that was we still saw it but it's very close to not being seen at all the distance question now yeah as you say you don't we don't really know how distant the wall signal was but there is one factor here it had to be at least past the distance of the moon right yeah or even maybe a little bit beyond yeah John Krauss look for anything you know satellites or whatever you know in our system our earth system and didn't see any but just noticing the shape of the response it appears that it's not widened whatever the signal was would would be a small angular size and would reflect our antenna pattern virtually perfectly that could only if the distance to the source were you know thousands of miles away and I think at one time he also said it was at least half the distance to the ruler maybe even beyond the moon but anyway at quite some distance which makes it but still there's a lot beyond the distance of the moon in our galaxy so we just have no idea what the distance would be and just simply no way to determine it if it if it had been very close like if it had been a satellite we would have seen the motion of the satellite or if it had been an airplane we would have seen extreme motion of the and distortion of the beam shape that resulted and we would have known that it was a in the Earth's atmosphere or ionosphere or reasonably close by of course we didn't see that so we have to conclude that it was out of some distance and you know the moon comes into play here it's gotta be a good fraction of the distance to the moon or beyond the moon we can't just think between those two possibilities now as you mentioned while was a really strong signal for what you were looking for and that stands out as a matter of fact the the infamous letters and numbers show specifically the signal strength now could that suggest that it was close not quite you know say it let's just say somewhere out in the solar system could the WoW signal have originated from within our local area out past the moon well again we can't tell what the signal strength was at the at the source I mean remember we on earth are putting out millions of watts in radars and yet we're detecting millions of millions of millions of watts you know the one thing that was determining of the back with the Ohio sky survey is we were detecting radio sources with flux densities of two tenths of a Jansky and a Jansky is 10 to the minus 26 watts per square meter per per Hertz and tended minus 26 is a hundredth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a watt but so extremely weak and yet if you were to actually happen to visit these sources you know some tens of thousands of light years away you would be fried immediately when you got too close so in other words a strong signal at the source does become a very weak signal when you're say ten thousand light years away now the while signal was there's always been this thing with an settie the the 1420 megahertz hydrogen line and this is the frequency at which neutral hydrogen as we've been talking emits radio now how close was the while signal to 1420 and the actual center of the hydrogen line how close are we I mean wasn't exactly dead-on or was it somewhere close by where was it the concept so we were thinking of is that if a intelligent civilization were to transmit the neutral hydrogen of frequencies or in the band of the neutral hydrogen would be a great place to put in a narrowband signal because it would be easily spotted and so that was actually the the receiver was designed to observe in and around the 14 twenty point four oh six five which is a neutral hydrogen frequency now the signal was as I recall very tight it was a very narrow band signal 10 kilohertz it seems to stick in my mind correct me if I'm wrong yeah that was that was a filter size filter Bank we had a filter Bank 50 channels each 10 kilohertz wide 10 kilohertz remember it's right around the size of an AM radio station which is typically about the same size so it's now nowadays most observatories are measuring down to one hertz wide or even a tenth of a hertz wide and they're they're using a different approach for the filter bank but back then we were able to get from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory Green Bank a filter Bank actually two filter banks that they were not using one had 10 kilohertz channels and that's what we decided to use there's another one that was wider by a factor of 10 and we decided not to use that filter Bank so anyway the filter Bank was a limitation on the width of the signal that we could detect so then the narrowband signal might have been much narrower than 1000 kilohertz could it have been wider but it could not have been wider could have been narrower because if if the single if the signal were say a thousand Hertz wide that is one tenth of the width we would receive one tenth of what it was if it were 10 kilohertz wide and of course we don't know the actual width of the signal other than its it's 10 kilohertz or less so we don't know how am i put so if you were if you were a transmitting civilization you would want as narrow of a signal as you can get close to the hydrogen line just to save energy a bad yeah so this yes this is an efficient signal essentially right and we have to take a break I will be back in a minute with dr. Jerry human discoverer of the WoW signal and we're back with dr. Jerry ehman now Jerry at the Big Ear didn't just pick up the WoW signal I mean it picked up other signals things that go bump in the night what were those and has any follow-up work been done to figure out what those other signals were well I'm not sure I understand what other signals of course anytime you know for the narrowband survey occasionally we would get a signal that registered as a 2 or 3 or 4 once in a while a 6 or 7 but they were they they lack the ability to cover several segments of time that is you know you notice the WoW signal covered 72 seconds six periods of 12 seconds each actually the sampling was done every second for 10 seconds then the computer needed 2 seconds to do its computing before starting another sampling so the WoW signal occupied 6 timeframes of about 12 seconds each these other signals that we might receive you know a one blip of a six or seven or three or four only lasted one timeframe occurred in one single and that's that you know you can't do much analysis on those because it could have been something about just the extreme pump of noise occurring or something else and who knows what it could be it's just there's just no way to analyze it so not just note not enough data to know what exactly any of those right exactly yeah and was wow we don't have a lot of data at all as you note in your paper half vast data so we're we're look there's not much there but there's enough to say hmm we should look for more always so it deep down do you what is your what is your personal sense do you think that this was it or do you think that this was oh maybe but probably not likely what do you what where are you is your personal feeling looking at the data and being directly involved with the bigger telescope given the behavior of what you guys would see with the Big Ear does this seem like it was it yeah I'm convinced well signal certainly has the potential of being the first signal from extraterrestrial intelligence but I can't prove it and on the other hand no one has been able to disprove it now there was a there was an article by an astronomer who claimed that the wild signal was caused by comet comet well I look at his paper and concluded that he didn't have things right there there's there's a my matrix conclusion is the behavior of a comet does not match the behavior of the WoW signal that's the simple phrase I use on top of that though if comets emitted a 1420 megahertz signal radio astronomers would have seen that by now yes and it could have been much quieter than than the 10 kilohertz - absolutely with with various Doppler shifts and so forth and then unfortunately this this author whom I'm not naming but his name is out in the public it can be looked up wrote a second paper still holding to the same idea but fortunately other astronomers many other astronomers have agreed with my conclusion that the behavior of the cow of a comment does not match the behavior of a while signal that's the wall that a comet simply is couldn't have produced this narrowband signal that we observed so I was I was grateful to hear and read that from other astronomers and we also have in our websites here a note written by Bob Dixon I had communicated to the Big Ear radio group my conclusions of that about this comet hypothesis and said I didn't agree with it and others in our group look at it and did a little bit additional analysis and discovered you know they agreed with it and so Bob brought up this this article in it that's on our website here the while signal seems to be you're walking along the beach and you see a plastic bottle a Pepsi bottle and you look at it and you say that's not natural that's a Pepsi bottle so it almost seems like the Galactic equivalent to that that it just looked so strange that it's just not a lot of other explanations for it but could it have been a glitch in the equipment have you been able to eliminate that something in the equipment somewhere had not created the signal yeah I certainly thought of that however the receiver in computer system was working before the signal came in and was working after the signal came in so wouldn't it be interesting or unusual if suddenly the receiver and computer let's say the receiver stopped working properly right at the moment that we got this signal I'm not buying that and you never saw anything any any anything from the equipment over the entire run lifetime of the tools that would create a false signal that's right like this that's right chances are the equipment was was functioning quite well right and and the fact that we looked you know something like a hundred times over a year or two well we stayed in 30 days on that same declination to see if we saw the signal again and we didn't and then months and years later we went back to the same declination to reabsorb and didn't see anything and then a colleague Bob gray went down to Tasmania and used radio telescopes there to try to to locate a signal and didn't find anything and I think went to Green Bank West Virginia and used telescopes there and couldn't find anything so this was this was a one-time thing and that's perhaps not out of line if there's an intelligent civilization that's maybe sending a signal in one direction at one time and another direction at another time and it's moving their telescope or device will hit whatever around and sending a signal and maybe they're not sending many signals at all I mean we've we've spent signals you know from Arecibo thousand flirtation so forth but this was not done very often and so it's someone on another solar in another solar system 2,000 years light-years away you know could have picked up our signal but wouldn't have found it again so it would have been there was signal that's right we would the Arecibo the infamous Arecibo signal or transmission is if anybody catches it it's there while signal because we didn't repeat it yeah and and again as you know too maybe the transmitter pointed in a different direction maybe it's still transmitting maybe we will catch the WoW signal again sometime is anyone looking oh yeah oh yeah full-time well in that area I mean there there's well the Alma array in Chile 66 dishes and the there's a facility up in California and I'm sure there are probably others that are doing this search you know but they they've got modern equipment computers so they can they've got much greater chance of seeing something than than we did because it had to be a signal at the at the declination we were observing if we were observing at a different declination we wouldn't have seen it and it's that's true in general dr. Krauss did a calculation I found on the website under the SETI primer that by conservative number see plugging in conservative numbers to the Drake Equation he's still concluded that there could be as many as 40 civilizations in the galaxy if you if you look at the equation which would mean that would it be that surprising if you've got that many civilizations at any given time in a galaxy would it be that surprising that you would get a signal are you referring to John Krauss using a franc greatest famous equation yes and from yeah well Frank Drake remember came up with ten thousand to ten thousand by his calculation ten thousand civilizations at any given time so is yeah not over the court the whole lifetimes that are within our galaxy within our galaxy ten thousand civilizations so you know the of course Frank trace equation is very interesting but you have to guess a lot at some of the factors and you can be guessing quite incorrectly perhaps you know so so if one person gets 40 and another gets 10,000 you know there's clearly um let's just say there's there's a concern about have I got the right set of numbers but the fact that there's more than one right from my point of view there's more than one we are an intelligent civilization although looking at that the politicians I'm not so sure about that that's a sword names no I have one last question for you I got one last question for you I want to dispel something that's been floating around on the internet for some time about the wild signal people seemed to think there was content and there wasn't of course talk about uj5 is a code for yes signal stroke yes uh-huh boy but you know some people have said well there's a message there or something like that was there any modulation of a signal or anything that would lead you to believe that there was any information being conveyed okay here's the problem the method of getting the data was to take a short sample probably on the order of a millisecond or so of each of the 50 channels and then in the next second repeat that process and then do that for 10 seconds running and then and together for a given filter given channel those 10 numbers and divide by 10 or you just keep the total doesn't matter which way you do it and then converge well subtract the background level from that which is a computation and get the signal level above the background or in the case of the negative form below the background and also compute the the level of the noise to randomness and then divide the signal level by the noise level and and you then convert if the if it turns up to be anything from six point zero to six point nine nine nine nine get right down the number six on the computer printout and do that and of course when you get above nine you start using the letters of the alphabet and so forth so we we got six e q u j v and u is the equivalent of 30 30 times the noise for the peak now you can't tell too much from that you can't tell anything about modulation because we've had each each number is like a one millisecond sample ten of them and there's no way you can detect modulation with ten isolated one millisecond samples I'm just using one millisecond as a you know it could have been ten milliseconds it couldn't have been much longer than 10 milliseconds but you can't you can't break out any modulation with such discrete data Woodhead yeah you just even if there was something you just there was no way to detect it so all you really can tell you can say is there is a signal there you can't really say now remember if you're talking to radio amateurs if they're using the old am amplitude modulation you can detect that continuous signal running and and pull out any modulation saying with FM frequency modulation if you convert to digital form like like many folks are now using well you have to sample frequently enough many many times a second thousands of times the second tens of thousands of times a second to be able to to extract the modulation so the bottom line is there was no way for us to detect the modulation and we had no equipment that was designed to record the continuous signal that we were receiving and recorded using audacity or something like that you know not converted to to the filters that we used so that's the downside of of our observing program and that's unfortunate no okay nowadays I was just going to say nowadays with current technology you know getting the modulation is much easier and quite possible I see now what about interstellar scintillation and its relation to the WoW signal it appeared to be a point source right right so you there was no if if you saw a signal that was very close and through the Earth's atmosphere you would see the same sort of effect that you see with the solar system versus the Stars you see the scintillation with the Stars but not with non point source things like planets so you actually saw that effect with the WoW signal no I don't think you could claim that really I mean we had only six data points so so there was no way to to detect scintillation in this case ventilation is in a sense similar to modulation a variation of the amplitude or frequency if it's fm and although we got was these six major data points 6 eq uj5 so though there was no way to detect I see also tellers pay again and so the interstellar medium you were unable to determine if there was any kind of scintillation in the interstellar medium that's correct I see now that would have been that's another would have been really nice to have with a signal angry technology back in the good old days was not as technical or complete as it is these days and but we had to we live with what we had still it it yielded to this day the most interesting signal study has ever detected in there later certainly did did detect a signal that I could claim was Wow yeah and and the interesting thing was Krauss caught on to the word Wow and declared it to be the wow signal that was that my doing there was John Ross is doing and so he he always inviting up an article always talked about the WoW signal by the way are you familiar with his book Big Ear - yes I know yes yeah he had an original the first version was big here that that was written before the WoW signal came Big Ear to TW oh now included all about the wild signal and so that that's good reading alright doctor um it was a pleasure talking to you today and I hope I hope that the radio astronomers will keep looking for what the next wow signal and then we can compare it to what you found so what do you think did the Big Ear radio telescope pick up an alien signal in this case it seems convincing that they might have but we may never know for sure since the signal has never repeated imagine if one day it does thanks for watching event horizon if you're new to our show hit the subscribe button so you never miss an episode [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Event Horizon

Views: 173,561

Rating: 4.8589916 out of 5

Keywords: Wow!, signal, SETI, universe, Ehman, Big, Ear, Telescope, Radio, KIC 8462852, Tabby’s star, Drake, Equation, Fermi, Paradox, Astronomy, Godier, Asmr, Alien, Extraterrestrial, Space, Allen, Array, Breakthrough, Listen, oumuamua, borisov, 6EQUJ5, event horizon, event, discoverer, event horizon john michael godier, fermi paradox, Wow! Signal, The Wow! Signal with Discoverer Dr. Jerry Ehman, unexplained, Carl Sagan, BLC1

Id: x67K-Vq1KWk

Length: 64min 4sec (3844 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 19 2019