[imagesource: John Chumack / Galactic Images]

Jerry Ehman had his ear to the universe on August 15, 1977, working on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence programme, or SETI.

That’s when he chanced upon some strange alien jibber-jabber.

The signal, heard through Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope, was coming from the direction of the Sagittarius constellation – see above.

Ehman was amazed by the chatter’s highly structured, seemingly deliberate form as it was translated into radio data on a computer printout.

The two-and-a-half-minute signal was also unusually loud – 30 times louder, in fact, than the normal background noise of general space.

Plus, it had an interesting frequency: 1420 megahertz, which is the resonant frequency of an energised hydrogen atom.

The one note he took at the time – “Wow!” – became the name of this compelling and strange signal that he believes may have been a sign from an extraterrestrial civilisation in some faraway corner of the galaxy:

Image: NAAPO

Since the signal was never heard again, scientists put it to bed, deducing that it was probably just an arbitrary sound from some not-so-strange space-related thing, like a comet or a star.

It has been 45 years, but Wow! hasn’t quite faded into history just yet, per The Daily Beast:

Now a team led by Columbia University astronomer David Kipping is making the case for a fresh effort to detect the signal. We should be able to find it—or confirm it’s gone for good—with just two additional months of hard work and some creative thinking, Kipping and his co-author, Chicago data consultant Robert Gray, wrote in their peer-reviewed study, which appeared online on June 22 and has been accepted for future publication in the science journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“I think it’s worth chasing down for a couple more months to get to the point where we could say with confidence that the field isn’t worth pursuing anymore,” Kipping told The Daily Beast. “Either we spend two months on the Wow! field and see nothing and can then move on, or we see a recurrence—and that would change the whole story.”

SETI’s methods for detecting whether or not we are alone in the universe have evolved quite substantially since 1977, so there might be more of a chance of hearing more now.

To make the Wow! signal credible as a sign of alien life, it needs to be heard more than once:

One key criterion remains the same: repeatability. It’s not enough to overhear an artificially produced signal once. After all, intelligent beings, if they’re trying to communicate with each other or us, wouldn’t broadcast just one message once, right?

They’d probably try again and again, most likely on a regular schedule.

That might be the problem, though, where a lack of imagination seems to be holding us back from fully realising the presence of our intergalactic peers.

Who is to say that they will communicate in the intervals we dub normal?

Perhaps their communication skills are completely other-worldly and scientists need to keep their ears cupped at all times.

[source:dailybeast]