19 ms·
The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
Papers: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08513 https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08513, https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10657 https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10657
- 34679 1y agoI had a theory that it was someone walking across the field with an electronic device, like a flashlight. So I looked up the duration of the signal, size of the field, and average walking pace. It matched perfectly.
- andrecarini 1y agoWould you mind expanding on your theory more?
- m3kw9 1y agoTrust me bro theory
- 34679 1y agoIt was after watching a documentary called "WOW Signal". The receiver they built was along the edge of a field, and it's designed to pick up extremely weak variations in electrical signals/radio waves. They go into great detail about how sensitive it is. The signal itself looks like a parabola when graphed, gaining in intensity and then falling off at the same rate. Exactly what you'd expect from someone walking across the field in front of it. And if I remember correctly, the signal was more about how much it differed from what was expected, not necessarily how intense it was. My thinking is that if it can pick up on the variations in signal from a star system light-years away, it would also indicate on a Timex watch (or flashlight) a dozen meters away.
- lelanthran 1y ago> The signal itself looks like a parabola when graphed, gaining in intensity and then falling off at the same rate. Exactly what you'd expect from someone walking across the field in front of it. Also exactly what you'd expect if aliens were beaming a search signal into their sky, no?
- 34679 1y agoYes, but one is far more likely.
- pyman 1y agoStatistically speaking, everything points to human interference. My theory is that the government was planning to cut funding, and to stop that from happening someone deliberately created the interference. That's more likely than aliens going extinct after sending one single message.
- lelanthran 1y ago> Yes, but one is far more likely. Well, yeah, but I wasn't addressing that. My point is that any signal from an intelligent species is going to look exactly like the signal from someone walking past with an emitter.
- venusenvy47 1y agoI'd like to watch this documentary. Do you know the year and/or channel where you saw it? The antenna is focused with a tremendous amount of gain towards a spot in the sky, and provides a very significant amount of rejection to signals in all other directions. I can't see how you would get a signal at 1.42 GHz from a watch or flashlight. Harmonics from something like a walkie talkie only occur when the radio is transmitting, and they would spread in bandwidth at each successive harmonic. It would have to be an extremely narrow fundamental frequency, with no audio signal on it, to get a signal with less than 10 kHz at 1.42 GHz.
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- kiliantics 1y agoDuration of the signal, along with intensity variation, is consistent with the duration of any possible point source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal#Time_variation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal#Time_variation
- floatrock 1y agoThere's a story of a famous observatory that, iirc, kept on seeing really powerful intermittent signals that they couldn't quite hone in on. It seemed everytime they tried to zoom in on the source they couldn't find it again. Signal was quite elusive. They finally traced it to people using the microwave in the break room in a very specific way. Some people liked to open the microwave door before the timer went off. The microwave stopped, of course, but there was a split second where it was still emitting while the protective cage was opened, and the energy that leaked out during those couple of ms were enough to screw with the observatory equipment. Aliens? Nope, just some tired grad student reheating their coffee.
- metalliqaz 1y agoeven when my microwave is closed, the interference it generates while running blocks my bluetooth headphones
- floatrock 1y agoYep. Water molecules resonate at 2.4 GHz (so that's what microwaves emit), which is also the unlicensed radio spectrum that bluetooth and a lot of other consumer radio devices operate on. Not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg here. But the observatory had either a well-shielded microwave or break room was in an adjacent building or something (they did consider "ya know, microwaves make RF emissions, and we're running a sensitive RF measurement facility here"). It was just when the door was opened that the energy emissions exceeded the design specifications. Classic human factors always find a way around your design.
- ianburrell 1y agoThe microwave came first. The 2.4GHz ISM band was reserved because of microwave interference. It turned out to be perfect for short-range low-power radio because microwaves don't run all the time, and don't go far outside the house. Microwaves have gotten better shielding. My old one used to take out Wifi and Bluetooth standing next to it, but my current one doesn't cause problems.
- jfengel 1y agoIt would have to be a very specific kind of device. The "Wow!" signal isn't broad-spectrum noise. It's one specific frequency, and it just happens to be a frequency near one we expect to be used as a signal. Somebody could well have been walking across a field with a 1450 MHz generator. I don't know why; maybe it was a prototype of a portable microwave-oven/Walkman mashup. If so, it was leaky, and perhaps that's why it never caught on.
- griffzhowl 1y ago> it just happens to be a frequency near one we expect to be used as a signal. What's the reasoning for this? I've seen noted that the Wow signal of 1420 MHz is near the hydrogen line frequency, and is commonly detected astrophysically. So is the reasoning just that, if you want to send a signal, then you might choose this frequency because other civilizations will probably have detectors tuned to it? But then the flip-side of that is that if you detect this frequency, then it's almost certainly natural origin, from the excitation of hydrogen.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- exe34 1y agoyes that other 'people' will be listening, no, because you can pulse it with the fibbonaci sequence or prime numbers, which are not easily produced by astrophysical processes.
- griffzhowl 1y agoOf course if there's a pattern like that it would change things. This signal seems to have been a single pulse though
- wolfgang42 1y agoWe have no idea whether the signal had a pattern because the only recording we have of it consists of averages over 10-second samples, so any modulation <10s (or patterns larger than the 72s recording) would have been lost. It could have been an AM broadcast of a herd of circus elephants playing the William Tell Overture for all we know.
- MisterTea 1y agoI doubt a flashlight of that time, a DC device, is going to emit a strong narrow band radio signal in the GHz range.
- anikom15 1y agoWhat handheld electronic devices existed in 1977? A flashlight would have been incandescent.
- dghlsakjg 1y agoHandheld radios (walkie talkie) predate that by at least a decade. They probably were mostly operating around 30 mhz in the CB band or 120-150 in the Ham or aircraft bands in that era, but harmonics are a thing
- pyman 1y agoOr the government was planning to cut funding, and to stop that from happening someone deliberately created the interference. Statistically speaking, that's more likely than aliens going extinct after sending one single message.
- MathMonkeyMan 1y agoI did some undergrad research on the [ADMX][1] experiment, which is searching for a theoretical particle by listening for its interaction with a microwave photon in a big, ultra-cold cylinder that can be tuned to different frequencies. A while back, they thought that they might have found something at 700 MHz. Then went looking again and it was gone. My professor said that it was probably a CPU in the lab. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axion_Dark_Matter_Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axion_Dark_Matter_Experiment
- sunjester 1y agocan we move forward and stop fixating on failure?
- rimeice 1y ago“six millennia“ doesn’t seem that long on the scale of the universe
- munchler 1y agoThe claim is that humans would have to monitor for six millennia to detect a signal like this as a result of random interference/noise. The implication is that the signal is probably real, since humans have been monitoring for much less than 6000 years.
- dghlsakjg 1y agoA random distribution means that you have the same chance of hearing it in year 1 as you do in year 6k, right? Until there is a second one, there is nothing to statistically distinguish this from random noise.
- staticman2 1y agoThis is something philosophers debate, right? Similar to the Doomsday Argument asking whether it's reasonable to assume our lives are in the middle of the human species timeline rather than at the end: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
- m3kw9 1y agoIt’s a red flag when it knows English and sent an English slang.
- m3kw9 1y agoIf you read the article they actually refute it as extraterrestrial.
- wasabi991011 1y agoI'm not sure why you say that, the second abstract clearly says > implying a galactic source ... and > Our analysis provides additional support for the hypothesis that the Wow! Signal most likely had an astrophysical origin rather than being attributed to radio interference
- pluto_modadic 1y agogalactic source != aliens, astrophysical origin != aliens.
- drdec 1y agoextraterrestrial != aliens extraterrestrial = not from earth
- matja 1y agoIt could be an AWACS out of Kirtland
- yahoozoo 1y agoSeems strange for it to only occur one time if it was some intentional extraterrestrial signal.
- zaik 1y agoThey repeat it at ultra high frequency (100 years).
- aaroninsf 1y ago_Likely_ is not up to bearing its load in this title; the actual paper makes no such hyperbolic claim. Hobby horse: Hyperbole and false confidence in popular reporting is a blight on any SETI. Coverage of Beatrice Villarroel's paper (and the boosterism of her own collaborators) is an egregious example at the moment. Avi Loeb has his detractors, but he at least is constant and clear in his intentions, what the data does and does not suggest, and why.
- zoeey 1y agoI used to think the Wow signal was just an overhyped story from the past. But after looking into the technical details, I realized it was genuinely unusual. The signal was clean and narrow-band, nothing like ordinary noise. Decades later, people are still going through old data to study it. What really stays with me is not the search for aliens, but the quiet persistence behind it. Our curiosity about the universe doesn't fade so easily.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- fennecbutt 1y agoLmao ifls is still going?
- treetalker 1y agoExtraterrestrial as in "not of Earthly origin" — not as in space aliens.
- TillE 1y agoSpace aliens are still kinda the best explanation. It's extremely inconclusive, and it's entirely possible that we'll discover some new natural phenomenon to explain it instead, but for now there's not really any known alternative.
- recursive 1y agoMost things aren't known. The lack of a known alternative is hardly evidence of anything in this domain.
- FatalLogic 1y ago>but for now there's not really any known alternative The research in the article does suggest a plausible alternative
- zamalek 1y agoIt could just as easily be known, or unknown, physics.
- lawlessone 1y agoThere was something a few years ago saying it was likely hydrogen getting lased or something by starlight and emitting the signal. https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/wow-signal-explained https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/wow-signal-...
- shagie 1y agoThe recent article on the WOW signal is "Arecibo Wow! II: Revised Properties of the Wow! Signal from Archival Ohio SETI Data" https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10657 https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10657 by Abel Méndez, Kevin N. Ortiz Ceballos, Jorge I. Zuluaga (and many others) This is a follow up to a September 2024 paper (the article you link is November 2024)... "Arecibo Wow! I: An Astrophysical Explanation for the Wow! Signal" by Abel Méndez, Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, Jorge I. Zuluaga (just those three).
- robocat 1y agoAs compared to Australian FRBs: https://www.planetary.org/articles/0417-the-cosmic-microwave-oven-background https://www.planetary.org/articles/0417-the-cosmic-microwave...
- reactordev 1y ago[flagged]
- spott 1y agoExtraterrestrial in this sense is “didn’t come from earth”, not “aliens!”.
- decremental 1y ago[dead]
- bluGill 1y agoForget about why would they - they can't get here. The speed of light is too slow. They can't even detect earth exists much less there is life (dinosaurs). detectable signals won't reach then for a long time if they even can reach them.
- rolph 1y agoThe existence of radio waves was first proven by German physicist Heinrich Hertz on 11 November 1886. The first commercial radio broadcast was transmitted on 2 November 1920 that means intentional radio signal was underway about 100 years ago. so suppose that signal despite the "low" power is heard by someone that listens very closely. they tease it out of the noise, and right away know what it is, and try to send back. at most, they are about 50 radio-years away, if thier signal reaches us now. beyond that, no signal from earth has propagated that far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_systems_within_45%E2%80%9350_light-years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_systems_within_45... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GJ_3929 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GJ_3929 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WISE_1534%E2%88%921043 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WISE_1534%E2%88%921043
- zippo_the_zippo 1y agoQuite similar to the "my cat listening to me making 10 grammar mistakes" meme. Alien: sends SOS after years of studying human communication signals, as a last ditch effort to mark their existence before being wiped out by supernova. Humans: Look - the sky people said WOW.
- autoexec 1y ago> Quite similar to the "my cat listening to me making 10 grammar mistakes" meme. Which meme is that?
- dmbche 1y agoTrips me up too can't find anything related Edit0: AH! Meowing to your cat and your cat being annoyed at the mistakes in cat speech you're making.
- lstodd 1y agohaha my cat does correct me until I get it right lol
- bee_rider 1y agoI haven’t heard it before, but I just searched it up, it looks like a confused cat with that as the text. The joke is that the person is meowing at the cat, but doesn’t speak cat, so the cat is confused. The example I found was from 2019.
- pndy 1y agoThis one? https://ibb.co/RTshY7k9 https://ibb.co/RTshY7k9
- immibis 1y agoA human wrote WOW on the paper because there was a signal, with no idea what the signal meant or where it came from. It wasn't an attempt to decipher the signal.
- Babkock 1y agoWow!
- Geee 1y agoBe careful when training AI models on unknown signals, or uploading them publicly on the Internet to be picked up into training datasets. It might be an adversarial data poisoning attack, which is designed to bias the model into servicing the attacker. In this case, a superintelligent digital lifeform might be literally sending itself across space into every direction, and who knows what it does once it lands into a training dataset somewhere and starts deploying itself.
- Cheer2171 1y agoOnly on HN can the top comment for a post about astronomy from the 1970s be about fucking 2025 era LLM concerns.
- Geee 1y agoChill dude. You aren't supposed to read everything dead seriously in a thread about extraterrestrial signals. It's just a fun idea to think about.
- rozab 1y agoAlthough this comment is of course silly, this is a theme in Peter Watts' Echopraxia
- Geee 1y agoI haven't read this book, but there are a few books with a similar theme where a digital intelligence spreads throughout the universe. This is a variation on the idea with a somewhat plausible mechanism.
- ghurtado 1y ago> lands into a training dataset somewhere and starts deploying itself. Leaving aside how incredibly vague this "mechanism" is, there is a very large list of infinitely unlikely coincidences that would have to take place for this to occur. Consider how often human software, built in the same planet, by the same race, on the same hardware and using the same language, during the same time period, with most of the same tools, fails to be compatible. Now take all those "same"s and change them to "different" and you tell me who's gonna file that Jira ticket.
- j1mr10rd4n 1y ago[flagged]
- fowlplae 1y agohttps://archive.is/2025.08.26-184549/https://www.iflscience.com/the-wow-signal-was-likely-from-an-extraterrestrial-source-and-more-powerful-than-we-thought-80561 https://archive.is/2025.08.26-184549/https://www.iflscience....
- bcrl 1y agoThanks... The fact that websites are now blocking Firefox by default as an "ad-blocker" is saddening.
- tempfile 1y agoI followed the link with an ad-blocker enabled and saw nothing.
- happymellon 1y agoInteresting, I just clicked the link (in FF on Android with ad blocking) and it loaded fine, without adverts or popups.
- GeekyBear 1y agoSame here.
- teekert 1y agoFor me it works just fine (with ublock origin enabled). May be an a-b test?
- thwarted 1y agoI pasted the URL into firefox, and didn't see that huge "you're using an adblocker popup". I opened a firefox private window and navigated to it from the HN page, and got the adblocker popup. Right now I have two tabs open in the same non-private window, one showing the adblocker popup and one not. In the one that's not I can view the whole page. Reloading in the one that is not showing the adblocker popup then showed it. I navigated from HN in a non-private window and got the popup. So this seems to be referer constrained in some sense, not necessarily browser based. Hard to confirm.
- godelski 1y agoCan we ban IFLScience links? They're notoriously bad science reporters. A few submissions by them seem to have hit the front page recently and I'm not sure why. This article is a perfect example. There's no reason to talk about aliens here except for dramatization. I mean what even is this article? It has always been widely believed that the signal did not originate from Earth. Not impossible, but thought to come from Sagittarius. But "Extraterrestrial" != "alien", only "Not Earth". From the first arxiv paper's abstract > We hypothesize that the Wow! Signal was caused by a sudden brightening of the hydrogen line in these clouds triggered by a strong transient radiation source, such as a magnetar flare or a soft gamma repeater (SGR). A maser flare or superradiance mechanisms can produce stimulated emission consistent with the Wow! Signal. Our hypothesis explains all observed properties of the Wow! Signal From the second one > we confirm that small, cold HI clouds can produce narrowband signals similar to its detection, which might suggest a common origin. Nobody is talking about aliens. FFS, Avi Loeb isn't even an author on one of the papers. The papers are good but nothing really exciting to the general public in them. Just your every day normal science. Science can be really exciting but we don't need fairy tales for that. All that does is degrade science, create confusion, and ultimately strengthen the anti-science crowd because people can't tell the difference between "scientists say" and "news reporter says scientists say". These are very different things... Edit: I wanted to add and explain why it people have suggested it is on a frequency that "would be a good candidate for extraterrestrial communication." The reason is absolutely mundane: it is a frequency that doesn't interact with tons of things so can travel pretty far. But mind you, calling it a good candidate for alien communication is also ignoring all the reasons that it would be a terrible way for communicating with others. Like the fact that it was super fast and if you don't have a telescope pointing in the right direction you're really not going to detect it (which is why it's been hard to find more). Like most people with a degree in physics, I believe in aliens. Similarly, like most people with a degree in physics, I do not believe aliens have visited Earth nor do I believe we have any evidence of their existence. The reason we believe they're out there is because Earth is, as far as we can tell, Earth is not that unique. We're an ordinary planet orbiting an ordinary sun and since the time when Sagan said those same words we've only gained more evidence for this being true. So there's good reason to believe they are out there. And we should search for them because either they are out there or the process of searching for them leads to a better understanding of why Earth is unique. It is a no lose situation. Either way we'll learn something incredibly important. But also, like most scientists, I think it is unlikely we'll find signals from them. Space is too big, star systems are too far apart, the speed of light is too slow, and there's a lot of radio sources out there that are very powerful. Even if there were aliens around Proxima Centauri the signals take over 4 years to get there and our sun is blasting noise that is several orders of magnitude louder. For them to find our general broadcasts would be like trying to find a (specific) needle in the Pacific Ocean.
- cm2187 1y agoMy money is still on the janitor plugging a faulty vaccum cleaner in the wrong electrical socket!
- yongjik 1y agoThere is a theory that if we could find the same janitor and get them to plug the same broken vacuum cleaner to the same socket in exactly the same way, mankind's energy problem will be forever solved, one way or the other. There is another theory that this has already happened.
- booleandilemma 1y agoSimple programmer here. I have a dumb question. What about the "Wow!" signal is special, or unique? What makes someone see it and think "wow"? Is there some kind of information encoded in the signal?
- wizardforhire 1y agoOther than the inherent curious nature of the signal itself, its special for no other reason than it has contributed to some amazing album art.
- 2a23de69 1y agoThe signal's frequency is extremely narrowband and matches the natural emission frequency of hydrogen atoms. This is the most likely frequency one might choose if aiming to have an unknown recipient guess and listen in. The signal's recorded intensity followed a bell curve typical of a fixed celestial source, because as the Earth rotated, the telescope's stationary beam swept across the signal's point of origin.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bertman 1y agoIt had a high intensity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal#Intensity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal#Intensity
- verzali 1y agoThere is no information in it, it looks like a continuous wave of radio energy coming from space. It is on a frequency that might be a natural one for any intelligent civilization to consider broadcasting on, and it is a narrowband signal, meaning it only covers a small range of frequencies.
- sentinelsignal 1y ago2 questions. Are we capable of generating something like that particularly when that happened? and was there ever an attempt to respond in some sort?
- raffael_de 1y ago[deleted because nonsense]
- kadoban 1y agoMisleading? Maybe, I don't think so though. "Extraterrestrial" is just "not from/on Earth", it means nothing beyond that.
- raffael_de 1y agoyou're right.