![]() ![]() ![]() John Kraus who designed it and came up with its $250,000 cost, including a $71,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. The Big Ear's design was called a Kraus telescope, after Ohio State's Dr. After a few days of data gathering, the flat reflector could be tilted a tiny bit, moving that line of study up or down across the sky. As the Earth rotated, the Big Ear swept the sky in a single line. ![]() This reflector received the signal bouncing off a tiltable flat reflector spanning the north end, just beyond the receiving horns, 104 meters by 30 meters. They were at the focus of a great paraboloidal reflector, 110 meters by 21 meters, standing across the southern end like a giant curved movie screen. Near the middle of its north end were a pair of receiving horns, looking like giant foghorns, pointing south. Its main feature was a vast aluminum ground plane, 150 meters by 85 meters, about three times the area of an average professional soccer pitch, and aligned north-south. The telescope no longer exists, having been disassembled in 1998 and its acreage used to expand a neighboring golf course. Ohio State's "Big Ear" radio telescope was, well, big. To understand where the signal came from, and (at least as importantly) how we know where it came from, it's necessary to understand the workings of the interesting radio telescope that received it. When you hear about the Wow! signal, one of the most important and obvious questions to ask is where it came from, and what's there. The longest single search project was carried out by Ohio State University, from 1972 to 1997. Virtually every radio telescope is used at least part time by some group scanning the skies looking for signals that might come from some interstellar source. For a long time, many different organizations have engaged in their own searches, but there's no central authoritative project. SETI stands for the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, but there is no single SETI group. All speculation and hype aside, Wow! remains the strongest candidate ever detected for an alien radio transmission. The strength of the signal was represented by the digits 0-9 and the letters A-Z, a scale of 36 levels of intensity, rising with 6EQ and falling with UJ5, a near-perfect bell curve of signal strength spread over 72 seconds. It came from the direction of Sagittarius. It was, apparently, a signal from outer space. So much so, in fact, that he circled the text, and wrote "Wow!" in the margin. In a moment that's since become one of the most famous events in astronomy, he saw a sequence of six characters on the printout - 6EQUJ5 - which caught his attention. But it's possible that other planets lie undiscovered in the system, Shostak said.It was August 15, 1977, when astronomer Jerry Ehman was examining data coming from Ohio State University's radio telescope, which was engaged in listening for signals from deep space, hoping to find something of intelligent origin. It wouldn't just go up and down right away," Shostak said.Īstronomers know that HD 164595 houses a roughly Neptune-mass world, but this close-orbiting planet is likely far too hot to host life as it exists on Earth. A satellite would be on, and maybe it'd be on for a minute or something like that. "The thought is: Well, that wouldn't be a satellite. This doesn't seem consistent with a signal from an orbiting satellite, which would be in range of the radio telescope for longer stretches, he said. The May 2015 and Wow! signals are analogous in another way, Shostak said: Both seemed to appear and then disappear quite quickly. If you see it once, but when you go back, with a camera and all that, it's not there, what do you conclude from that?” "There are going to be signals that you see once and don't see again," Shostak added. (Image credit: The Ohio State University Radio Observatory and the North American AstroPhysical Observatory (NAAPO)) When volunteer astronomer Jerry Ehman found that a signal detected in 1977 was 30 times more powerful than the average radiation from deep space, he wrote "Wow!" on the computer printout, as photographed here. ![]()
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