The Signal That Missed the Second Beam

Name: The Signal That Missed the Second Beam
Genre: Documentary

Astronomers hunt for a signal that appeared once, skipped Big Ear's second beam, and refused to reveal a source.

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Transcript

For 72 seconds, the signal filled Big Ear's entire observation window.
Then it ended—and the signal has never recurred.
On August 15th, 1977, Ohio State's Big Ear scanned the sky.
Big Ear could watch one point for only 72 seconds, using Earth's rotation.
Two feed horns got beams separated by 2 minutes 50 seconds of right ascension.
Sources were usually detected in one beam, the other 72 seconds later.
But the detection appeared in only one of the two beams.
The data could not show which feed horn had received it. Volunteer astronomer Jerry Ehman later reviewed the printed record.
The printout showed 6EQUJ5; Ehman wrote “Wow!” beside it.
The famous sequence encoded changing intensity, not a message.
Its peak was 30 to 31 standard deviations above background noise.
A record can preserve a shape while losing the thing that made it.
A follow-up watched continuously for nearly 14 hours across multiple days.
It found nothing resembling the Wow signal, down to about 18 janskys.
The Very Large Array also found no narrow-band point source at the coordinates.
A later study proposed a cold hydrogen cloud could have brightened suddenly.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute said the natural proposal stayed unproven.
The searches found no source—and in 1998, the only Big Ear that had heard the signal was demolished.

The searches found no source—and in 1992, the only Big Ear that had heard the signal was demolished.

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