The Letter U That Broke the Scale

Name: The Letter U That Broke the Scale
Genre: Documentary

The cryptic printout reveals a precisely shaped surge containing the largest value Big Ear had ever recorded.

This episode needs All Access, from $4.99 a week.

Transcript

The Wow! signal lasted 72 seconds—and never happened again.
The famous printout read 6EQUJ5—but it was not an encoded sentence.
Those six characters recorded intensity rising from six to 30, then falling back to five.
Volunteer astronomer Jerry Ehman found the anomaly while reviewing computer printouts by hand.
Jerry Ehman noticed something unusual during a narrowband radio survey at Ohio State.
The letter U represented an intensity between 30 and 31 standard deviations above background noise.
Its six points matched both a Gaussian curve and a squared sinc function above 0.99.
The record preserved 10-second integrations, 2-second processing, and 1-sigma output steps.
The Wow! signal remains unidentified; its record used a 10-minute baseline and root-mean-square smoothing.
The Big Ear radio telescope used two feed horns, receiving beams from slightly different directions.
A continuous source fixed on the sky should rise for 36 seconds, then fall for 36.
The Wow! signal followed that rise and fall—but appeared in only one beam.
Follow-up searches ran nearly 14 hours across multiple days and found no similar emission.
Ehman circled “6EQUJ5” and wrote “Wow!” beside it.

The signal appeared in one Big Ear beam—but 72 seconds later, the second beam heard nothing.

All Access is $4.99 a week, $14.99 a month or $39.99 a year. The annual plan starts with three days free.

Renews until you cancel. Terms · Privacy