I love how we say it can only be an alien signal if it repeats but our own signal we sent out was done once. That's all. So anyone who received our artificially generated signal and sat there waiting for it to repeat is going to be as disappointed as we are with the WOW signal. Perhaps once is all any civilization sends out a message.
if the wow signal is alien in nature, of some kind, it would really have to be pointed right at us - the thing we sent out was not pointed at any specific planet or even star system. (edit, its is highly unlikely anything will ever properly get what we sent out, it was not powerful enough and it will too spread out before it gets to where it was pointed)
@@LDrosophila And that's probably all it could amount to in the foreseeable future. The time delays are generations long at the very shortest distances.
We're looking for a dedicated first contact transition. Like a laser array that flashes the first 1000 prime numbers in binary (or probably something better thought out). Sending one pulse could just as easily be a interference or equipment error and therefore is an unlikely strategy for any intelligent life to employ. Our METI efforts thus far have largely been stunts. No one actually expects someone to detect our signals that would have missed the obvious biosignatures in our planet's atmosphere. With JWST we would be able to see ourselves from further away then our signal has "reached" (even though it's fainter then you could reasonably expect anyone to pick up on).
@@xBINARYGODx true but if a message is beamed point to point to candidate stars in a pattern, it would take far less power and it could be done. Hell if we were able to hear the wow signal just two more times, we could even figure out how many planets were being targeted by the sender, because if the signal durtion was 72 seconds and reorient transmit, we could get a ballpark estimate of how many planets that signal is trying to reach out to, and that would be amazing. All said and done, it's a trippy subject and these things could be done. However as another commenter pointed out, this all depends on a sender that is rotating the message locations and continuously sending. We as humans have only ever point broadcast once. and its entirely possible the sender did the same. What this really means is, for any realistic chance of picking up the signal again, we'd have to poitn to at least one civilization that was doing it consistently... ie us. So I think the rational argument is that we file away the wow until we start broadcasting point to point to at least a collection of systems.. because we'll be able to realistic say.. well, we did it... so...
We can't say the WOW signal didn't repeat. It could've repeated ten times. The array that captured it was flat and scanned the sky using the rotation of the earth. So they had to wait a full 24 hours just to get back to that general region of space. We'll never know. It very well could've kept going or been going for some time before it was detected.
@@timoteubert7068 As far as I know, no other telescopes were on that patch of space but the Big Ear, though I believe they asked other telescopes to focus on it once the Big Ear wasn't facing that direction anymore, and they didn't capture anything. They have looked in that direction since and haven't captured it again. So, my point was, we don't know how long that signal could've been repeating before it was detected. We can't say it didn't repeat or that it wasn't longer. Earth's telescopes only caught the 70 seconds or whatever it was.
We know the signal stopped because the second receiver didn't hear it when it swept the same location in space 3 minutes later - the signal was gone and was never heard again despite lots of looking.
@@stargazer7644It could have repeated before it was originally detected - it may have been sent once or twice shortly before the final time when it was detected
It’s crazy to think the WOW! signal is still out there, traveling through space, now 46 light years away from us. It blows my mind to think about where it is from and how it came to us. And what are the odds that the telescope caught it when it did… wild.
Could be a million light years until another civilization picks it up, and even then it could be many millions of years before that when it was originally sent.
@@tylerk3616It won't happen. Every time it doubles the distance it has gone, the signal gets 4 times weaker. Every time it goes 10 times farther, it gets 100 times weaker. Eventually the signal will become weaker than the background noise of the universe, and will be lost forever. Based on how strong it was when we heard it, it can only go about 5 times farther before it is lost in the noise. It is quite possibly already gone.
The deep field pictures get me. Staring at all those galaxies we could be looking at millions of civilizations. And the fact that our observable universe is a miniscule fraction of whats supposedly out there gives me chills.
Don't tell anyone, but it was a gravitational microlensing event, basically a massive cosmic object, star, black hole, or otherwise, passed between Earth and a distant radio source (galaxy, quasar, white hole, ect.), temporarily aligning in such a way that the object's gravitational field acted as a lens. This lensing effect magnified and focused the radio waves from the distant source, resulting in a brief, intense burst of radio waves that was detected by the Big Ear telescope. The transient and singular nature of this event aligns well with the characteristics of gravitational microlensing, where the unique alignment of the observer, lens, and source amplifies the signal in a temporary and unrepeatable way, but also debris and interference can make the detection appear narrow field.
@@WheresPoochie I guess if you were actually interested in the underlying principles of gravitational microlensing search for a paper titled "Microlensing mass measurement from images of rotating gravitational arcs" it's got the basic principles of gravitational microlensing and it's use for measuring the mass of isolated, really faint, or non-luminous objects in the galaxy. If you're seriously asking about microlensing and it's effects on distant radio sources, The Cosmic Lens All Sky Survey (CLASS) in New Mexico, has made some discoveries you could look into and if you're just interested in the radio frequency aspects then "Astrophysical Applications of Gravitational Microlensing", is a collection of open source papers and if you look through the references you'll find one that's a thesis and that's the one you want, but I can't remember his name, sorry.
@@WheresPoochie I guess if you were actually interested in the underlying principles of gravitational microlensing search for a paper titled "Microlensing mass measurement from images of rotating gravitational arcs" it's got the basic principles of gravitational microlensing and it's use for measuring the mass of isolated, really faint, or non-luminous objects in the galaxy. If you're seriously asking about microlensing and it's effects on distant radio sources, The Cosmic Lens All Sky Survey (CLASS) in New Mexico, has made some discoveries you could look into and if you're just interested in the radio frequency aspects then "Astrophysical Applications of Gravitational Microlensing", is a collection of open source papers and if you look through the references you'll find one that's a thesis and that's the one you want, but I can't remember his name, sorry.
@@WheresPoochie I guess if you were actually interested in the underlying principles of gravitational microlensing search for a paper titled "Microlensing mass measurement from images of rotating gravitational arcs" it's got the basic principles of gravitational microlensing and it's use for measuring the mass of isolated, really faint, or non-luminous objects in the galaxy. If you're seriously asking about microlensing and it's effects on distant radio sources, The Cosmic Lens All Sky Survey (CLASS) in New Mexico, has made some discoveries you could look into and if you're just interested in the radio frequency aspects then "Astrophysical Applications of Gravitational Microlensing", is a collection of open source papers and if you look through the references you'll find one that's a thesis and that's the one you want, but I can't remember his name, sorry.
Little known fact: radio astronomer Jerry R. Ehman was looking at the printout upside down when he noticed the signal data. He then wrote ¡MOM, wanting to show his findings to his mother later. The rest, as they say, is history. Joking aside, this was a fascinating topic that hopefully continues receiving attention from the scientific community.
I only understand maybe 10% of the content of Cool Worlds videos, but i am absolutely glued to the screen for 100% of my time watching them. I am so grateful that such diligence and brain power is given to these subjects, even if i struggle to immediately understand what i’m watching. Keep up the great work 👍
yah i know what you mean. i think a high iq is required to fully understand is channels videos. us middle iq people are better off going elsewhere on our level
@@gabrielM1111nah don’t say that. a number like iq can’t quantify a persons ability to enjoy content like this. even if it’s hard to understand, it’s worth continuing to watch and support. don’t sell urself short. if all of us average folk could grasp this easily we’d all be astronomers and maybe someone would’ve found the next Wow signal by now 😂
Observatory's are expensive to run, require specialized personnel to operate, take years to show results, and whilst all data on space is useful, to the less educated and enlightened members of the population ( *Glances at evangelicals and the many inanities of hardliner religions quoting thousand year old texts as if they still hold meaning today* ), such facilities are a "waste of money better used on Earth"
There is ALOT of sky, and there are MANY interesting things to look at. Even If we took only the observatories we would needed to watch that one point for a year we would miss out on thousands of other significant events. If we knew there was alien contact on the other end of that project it would be worth it 100%. But the evidence isn't there to dedicate that kind of time to one small spot when there is so much going on in the universe.
@@Shinzon23 lol the immediate jump to blame religion rather than blaming the fact that almost all public funds are being allocated to the military-industrial complex and half-assed public services that don’t even work but somehow manages to suck up all funding. Even if religion up and disappeared tomorrow, there’s no way the budget for space exploration increases. Congress would sooner buy shiny cool explody shit from LMT than increase space exploration funding. Unless it’s space militarization of course. The only way we get more funding for space exploration is if China starts getting serious about space exploration. Nothing like a good cold war space race. Right now, space exploration is a “oh i guess that’s cool” in most people’s minds… people just don’t think it’s a priority because of all the immediate problems that we must overcome right now. War in ukraine ring any bell to you?
@@TheFinagle I don’t think there’s that many events out in the universe that require a “right now!” type of observation and the events that do are usually rare and don’t happen every day. Events get follow up observations depending on how much importance they’re given, so it means this event was only given that much importance and after initial observations it was deemed no longer important.
@@Hartbreak1 An event doesn't have to be rare to be significant. There's a lot of space and there's ALWAYS several things we could be learning or seeing, but we only have so many instruments and can only watch a very small amount of the sky at a time. We miss so much just because we were not looking right at it at the right time, and this signal is just one in a long list of things we could be watching instead of the things we did watch.
Wait... You mean to tell me there has only been a relatively few HOURS of subsequent observation of the relevant area? WTF! Dude I would have never guessed that. We should have receivers pointed there at all times for at least 5-10 years minimum. If that is a directional transmitter on an Exoplanet it could take centuries before the planet comes back around to point towards us. At the very least they should give it a decade before giving up but it feels like they literally just gave up the moment it happened with just random observations here or there because someone was bored.
Bonkers isn't it? I hope as satellites and the like get cheaper, some millionaire with an interest in this can comission a simple satellite that just looks for the WOW signal that uses its height and lack of atmosphere watch continuously for Wow.
@scalpel Given the strength and the fact it was blue shifted it would be wise for the government to care. If you are getting potential alien signals strong enough to suggest they are rather close and the shift of the slight suggest its getting even closer it be a good idea to follow up and either identify or rule out just so you don't have and surprises showing up on your door step in a few decades.
@@peterwarnett whats suppressed? Aliens? Bro gimme a break. Every government in the world wants to be the first to report they found alien life so much so that they jumped the gun and reported they found it when we found what we thought were fossils from Mars that turned out to be ferro compounds. made naturally. Every other year someone's reporting they found alien signals which turn out to be bull. Governments would literally kill to show their superiority by being first to find alien life but they haven't yet. All that cover up stuff is to hide blackops aircraft not aliens.
This video is such a gem! Sorry to hear Robert Gray passed away. Respect for doing real science and publishing along with educating the public. It is one of the few, rare youtube channels in this regard. The quality of the video is exceptional, as always! Live long and prosper, prof. David Kipping!
You do a really great job of making science seem like a "collective human endeavour," like it's a journey and process that we're all undertaking to some extent, and we're all progressing in. It's nice. I'm not sure if I 100% agree, but it's a nice sentiment.
I mean, practically we are all working towards our scientific understanding. At least it seems that way to me. For basically our entire existence our progress has been tied to scientific understanding. We've been wrong a lot but we keep being wrong less.
Here’s the thing; no matter what branch of science you’re exploring or making discoveries in, and no matter what purpose, it’ll all adds to and benefits the collection human knowledge. So in a sense, it is.
I’d argue most of society contributes to science by simply being an active part of society. How would scientists discover anything beyond the basics without the world we’ve collectively built around them?
Can't one of our holy billionaire s pop for 5-8 dishes scattered across the globe to monitor... I believe you can buy a 5 meter antenna for less than a million installed
@@acmelka I don't think a 5 meter dish would detect the WOW signal. Gray's backyard dish probably never had a chance. The Big Ear's dish was 21 by 110 meters, 2300 square meters. A quarter that size should have still detected it, say 600. If today's Low Noise Amplifiers are 30 times as good as what they used in the 1970s then, yes, a 20 square meter antenna would work.
@@acmelka if you're talking about musk, he was forced to buy twitter, twitter basically hoodwinked him and overexaggerated the value of the company and some things that made musk want to buy it in the first place, in the end, he tried to back out of the deal, but was forced into it... so
It seems like one more potential hope for it being an ET signal would be that you can't just ignore signals that don't repeat, or repeat extremely rarely, because it doesn't account for how many other potential sources of non/rarely-repeating signals there may be. So, in essence, they would have a shorter repeating interval, but that interval would be based on the density of intelligent life producing signals like this. You could even estimate the density of intelligent life from the assumption that this is a non-repeating signal from intelligent life. Something like arecebo planetary radar sweeping through another star system looking for asteroids, just happening to be directed at us at just the right time, so it could never repeat from the same source, but another civilization might do the same thing in the future.
I think we tend to assume too much about alien behavior and alien technology. We should be just as skeptical of the naysayers as we are of unconfirmed positive results. Our concepts of aliens is nearly 100% speculation. When it comes to civilization-building species, we only have ourselves as a reference point. We have a compass but no map. There is no such thing as an alien expert, but so-called experts like to have their reasoned-out hypotheses about aliens and are quick to dismiss anything outside of those boundaries. Maybe these particular aliens don't have a reason to make orderly repeating signals. Maybe they think Dyson Spheres are a bad idea. Maybe their technology works in a way we can't imagine and we simply can't pick up their signals with our current technology. Maybe their very biology works in a way we've never considered. We can really only make assumptions based on what we know and what we think we still have to learn. Despite our advancements in the past few hundred years, our ignorance is possibly infinite and anything we think we know is potentially false.
Well you may be glad to know seti has been sending out signals to space giving info of are planet's location in the milkyway.altho I fully agree that this is a terrible idea n despite there warnings they do it anyways
Also u are 100 %correct we may have a better chance with a.i going through the data and see if it can depict if it's created by alien life forms. But as you said we have no idea what they could be how they are or the way they may speak if they even speak. Why would we assume they created radios and use radio waves at all
Thank you, Professor! My mind is challenged without being overwhelmed. The implications of the subject matter are some of the most profound questions ever asked. I thoroughly enjoy how much I learn with each and every video. With gratitude and admiration.
I share your enjoyment, Anthony! And this makes now 3 videos from you, Prof. Kipping where i could not hold back my tears - because the amount of emotions you put into those videos is something I've felt my whole about astronomy, but could so far barely find anyone who shares that - until now. Thank you very much!!
@hey human every system has its manuel- in order to master it- you must understand all its compositions- for humans the catalogue of the earth should be demmanded otherwise it's just trying after trying without getting anywhere .
I have a question, professor. Doesn't lack of new detection of the wow signal also reduce the probability that the signal is from some natural phenomenon?
The fact that it was a narrowband signal mostly eliminates all natural phenomena. Only technology generates narrowband signals. So then the signal was either interference from our own technology, or from alien technology.
@@stargazer7644 Those are certainly two possibilities, but your inability to think of a third, fourth, or fifth possibility doesn't make your conclusion meaningful. That's a fallacy I see a lot in research. "I can't think of another explanation, so my conclusion is therefore correct."
A lot of this is beyond my understanding, but you explained it effectively enough that I've been able to follow along and be as excited as you seem! Thank you.
Such a perfect outro for him. Not only is he the core of whatever answer we find, but his family, children or even a brother of his, can benefit from his mission. This is something we all want. His book sales will not only feed this final answer in the future but also feed those whom he loved.
The videos you produce to the standard that you do, bring me more peace and hope than words can articulate. I wish, when I was in high school, that science & physics were taught in the same engaging and awe inspiring format that you do. Thank you so much, you’re a truly gifted educator 👏🏽 Rest easy Rob, you’ve got the best man on the job to take over your hard work and passion 🖤
45 years is but a blink in time. And perhaps, the Wow signal was not intended for us at all. For example, as a mariner, we typically keep the VHF on channel 16...the general hailing freq. But often when you wish to have a more private conversation with another sailor, once the chan. 16 hail has been acknowledged, we switch to another freq. to keep 16 open. So....maybe the Wow signal was just such a request for a freq. change between communicators.
That's what I think happened. The Big Ear receiver picked up a radio signal that wasn't meant for Earthlings but we accidentally picked it up by chance because the receiver was in the exact spot at the exact right time to pick it up.
While I don’t agree that Wow can be “conclusively excluded” based on repeatability (owning to the fact that our own signals to the universe have never been repeated)..I am pleasantly surprised to see Cool Worlds increasingly discuss the 👽 topic. Please continue.
This. For some reason we portray aliens as these static beings why are trying to be found. If they are like us, they're transmissions will appear random, un focused and relatively weak, with rand focused transmissions reaching out with no real hope of being detected.
Our radio and TV signals, and now computer signals, go out from Earth every day. This includes reruns of those radio and TV programs, hit movies, etc. So there's some small potential that repeating (rerun, repeat airings) programs could go out along with non-repeating but non-random signals. Would our media survive the distance to other stars? Would it make any sense to aliens? No idea. But it might.
@Cool Worlds What about a model that backs into some drake equation answers by using assumptions like: (1) aliens at the same phase of technology where they would bother to send/receive a Wow signal are like human beings, and would also do a non-repeating for a few mins, (2) data about the region of sky that has been observed/not observed for the four interesting reasons you mention in your video by all radio telescopes including Big Ear and for how long, (3) some other assumptions based on likely number of habitable exoplanets in the galaxy?
My condolences to you and to Robert Gray’s family. May he Rest In Peace. I hope that someone at NASA will take up this research now that they are open to looking into UAPs.
You're just unbelievable, Professor. In a technical, scientific video, you paid homage to Robert Gray. Your sense of wonder and mission are invaluable to us. Thank you.
I don't think we can say it never repeated. We have looked in, or maybe more accurately listened back to, the area we believe* it came from. But far from continuously. My understanding is that it has NOT been monitored the VAST majority of the time. *My understanding is that the two horns mean we are not certain which part of the sky it came from. But that may be wrong.
@@tabby73 he did, and Robert did. I don't know how much of the possible source area his telescope could cover though. Even if it was 100%, the rotation of the Earth means he is only monitoring it a fraction of the time. I do hope it was aliens even though I wouldn't bet money on it.
You are a one-of-a-kind scientist and man. Over the last year or so I've become a very big fan of your work. You really put the heart back into human exploration and science.
C'mon Robert, you only needed 1,500. more hours, how rough, and tragic... The footnote that he was the first amateur astronomer granted access to such an array will live on. Thank you man, will read the book!
Love how you “squeeze” everything out of the data, as you said. This video and the one about artificial gravity where you showed the graph of practical spaceships and requirements for artificial gravity on long journeys. Just love seeing all the possibilities instead of just saying “hey this idea is cool”
I'd like a thought experiment on this, coming from the hypothetical aliens viewpoint. Why would you send the signal? Where would you send it to and how often? Why would you send a narrow beam signal in one direction only? What if their resources are limited and they could not 'afford' to send it in our direction again? (in the same way our telescope resources are limited) - would that even be a thing for a more advanced civilisation? Lots of other questions too about their side of the story.
depending on how far away the source is, a movement as small as tectonic shifts could redirect the signal billions of eventual miles away. so I guess it could be that. or it could be a spray and pray strategy. maybe due to power limits, orbits or similar. could be literally anything at all depending on how that life evolved to communicate, relate to consciousness or time etc. 🤷♂️
You're assuming it would have to be an intentional signal to other civilizations. We're constantly sending out radio waves from antennas, satellites, into space that anyone could observe
It seems odd that, as someone who really hates math, that it turns out to be the most accurate portrait of our universe possible. Your analysis moves me to re-enroll next semester. Thanks.
I imagine Robert Gray is resting peacefully knowing that Dr Kipping is continuing the search to WoWs meaning. I would've loved being a fly on the wall when this transmission was seen for the first time. Thank you for creating another amazing video. I adore Cool Worlds and all the content you produce! Thank you!
This is a prank gone horribly wrong. Someone out there has a great burden on their conscience, no doubt. Why doesn't someone do a FOIA request for old military satellite telemetry data?
Something I'm not seeing talked about is whether it could have been a direct signal. Could they have simply waved 'Hi' and got no response and moved on? I know METI has been looking into this. We could send 360 burst ping on that channel, but who knows who will hear it, and how long will it take to get there?
I have a question: how many times we sent and repeat the signal? Even though we did sent a few times, we never repeat it! So from our own behavior we can draw conclusion that repeat of the signal is only way to say it's artificial signal! So answer is no, because we never didn't repeat our own signal! Secondly if you study the signal it looks like someone/something that sent it, move to the line - we if want to say someone "hey we exist" we would do the same, we would move the frequency, to show it's artificial! So reverse your thoughts, start from what we would do and what we did till today and if we do decide to send today, what's the best way for someone to recognize us! If you reverse it everything is matching like a glove !
We would send a repeating signal if it wasn't just for show. It's way easier to show something is artificial when it's like flashing the first 100 digits of pie in binary repeatedly rather then one signal. With energy limitations we might only do it occasionally but, if you stop there's no way for the sender to do follow up and go through the process of decoding, locating, and sending a reply. Even just a signal that repeats once a day with some weird properties like different lengths and frequencies of transition every day would make it way easier.
The fact that the signal didn't repeat has nothing to do with if the source sent it more than once or not. It has to do with the fact that a signal that was RECEIVED only once cannot be confirmed.
the best wow analysis i ve ever seen, and mate big respect with how much passion you put in this videos,editing,explaining things etc, thats a true passion, massive respect mate!
Given that this entire video highlights our inability or unwillingness to consistently monitor a region of space that is agreed upon as "the most compelling candidate for an alien radio transmission ever received" -- why would we at all assume an alien species has any consistency in signal casting? It's completely plausible that this is a 1-off signal that an alien species sent directly towards our solar system because they recognized that it has a potentially habitable planet. And it's completely plausible that they assume one transmission is all to takes to get the attention of a sufficiently advanced species. So many of our scientists want to just stop looking in the wow field because nothing ever repeated. How unlikely is it then that alien scientists stopped looking here after we didn't respond? (setting aside the thousands-of-lightyears between us making it virtually impossible to respond anyway)
They have no way of knowing if we are advanced enough to detect such a signal or that we are even listening, or if they have they know we aren't listening that closely. So in either case they'd repeat it frequently. They are also probably at least a few dozen light years away, maybe much farther. So they haven't seen our radio signals at all yet. They may have a really good telescope that tells them Earth is habitable.
From my naive perspective I find it truly frustrating that we have dedicated just 184 hours of observations to advance our knowledge on this! I imagine that there is an absurd amount of very compelling studies that need observation time, but it’s such a basic question for humanity that it feels “right” to dedicate more resources to it…
I have always had this curiosity about the Wow! Signal! I am so glad you are interested as well! It has always seemed to me that there weren't enough people trying to detect it again or that were at least studying it. In 1977, I was 10 years old, and I read about the Wow! Signal back then because my father always had a subscription to Scientific America (and other science/tech magazines) in the house. In the Army, my father worked with Radars and Satellites in the Signal Corps.
Amazing work again, and it definitely gives me some hope for a repeat, but I'm still wondering how does not detecting it again rule out the possibility of a one-off intelligent signal, either something like the one-off messages we've sent into space, or some accidental leakage that won't be directed our way again?
A one-off signal is fully accounted for by this model remember! The probability of someone sending a one off is not that important, the real issue is the probability of detection is infinitesimal. If someone sends one signal out over *all time* (which defines a one off) then the probability of detection is far far far far less likely than some kind of repeating schedule.
@@CoolWorldsLab so essentially the odds of wow being a one-off intelligent signal and us happening to detect that one-off signal would be insanely small?
@@jamesgeary4294 yeah I think it’s saying the odds of us picking up a one off signal is so small that scientifically speaking we couldn’t conclude that is the case.
@@liammoore7122 I wonder then could the same model used to figure out how much more observation time was needed to confirm wow also be used to ask how frequent one-off signals might be if we assume wow is one, and that the Big Ear radio telescope still detected one over its search time? Maybe could be a proxy for how many civilizations are in the galaxy?
We attempted to signal aliens once: the Arecibo message. It lasted for about 3 minutes. We sent it ONCE. So ... the fact that WOW never repeated does not rule it out, now does it?
If it is an alien signal, my first thought was it wasn't meant for us. It was a message from one alien system to another and we briefly got in the way. But the more I thought about that the more unlikely it seemed. Space is so vast that the idea we just happened to drift through the beam seems incredibly unlikely. So what is likely? Maybe the message wasn't meant for us, as in Earth, but it was meant for a receiver in our solar system. A lurker probe somewhere nearby was receiving an update.
Bracewell probe? If there is one lurking about, it'd have to be operating via a AI with the ability to crank its clock speed/perception of time up and down to let it not go insane from being alone with noone to talk to for potentially hundreds of millions of years. If the "Wow" signal was a communication attempt to said probe sleepingaway eternity, then either whoever sent it was extremely close to our solar system and focused the signal on where the probe was lurking, or they are extremely confident that a single signal would be enough to wake it. For the second point, this isn't that out of the realm of possibility; modern nuclear subs (not the tinkertoy pieces of shit the Red Chinese use) are sent ELF and ULF radio signals that are essentially used for nothing more than the equivalent of a few Morse code dots and dashes that tell a particular sub to surface to periscope depth to poke her comms antenna above the water to receive full orders, and the "Wow" signal could be this; a "upon receipt of any sort of message on this frequency,set perceptual time to full and respond back on secured transmission methods to avoid detection" activation signal. I'd also pray that if it is an activation signal for something lurking in our solar system that it is bracewell probe, not a Von Neumann probe set to Berserker anything nearby when activated, in which case we're all f***** andoing to die and in a tide of infinitely duplicating drones
The wow signal is one of my favorite topics. The problem I see is that we know that the signal doesn't repeat very often, or we'd have seen it. But it's also been 45 years. Why would an alien spend 45 years (or likely more, if we haven't seen it since, we probably didn't see its first instance) trying to reach us, but only transmit so sporadically? Isn't there a stronger possibility that they have just given up by now? In this case further searching must be fruitless. Or, statistically speaking, the probability of a detection in new observations is not necessarily the same as it was then. But if it's a terrestrial artifact, it most likely would not repeat either, especially 45 years later. 45 years may or may not be a long time for aliens, but it is for us. And it doesn't look like a natural signal, but it can't be ruled out, either. Natural signals don't typically repeat erratically, they normally repeat regularly or not at all. But nature is also very patient and if the signal has a period of 45 years or more, it would not be reproducible either. Since we don't know what kind of natural signal could have produced it, it's hard to constrain this. Unfortunately the most likely outcome of further searching is coming up empty, and this is consistent with all three origins for the signal.
Maybe the signal was't aimed specifically toward Earth in the first place. Let's just play with the thought that there are aliens somewhere in the galaxy and they have no idea that there is life on Earth. They're randomly sending out signals just like I assume we humans do. Maybe we just got lucky that the signal hit Earth in the first place. Perhaps a sign that we just weren't ready to begin with. I shudder at the thought alone of actually *detecting* a verified alien signal. That would be terrifying and exciting at the same time.
Sending signals long distance is energy intensive, so if you don’t know that technological civilizations are currently in the area then it makes sense to play the long game and transmit infrequently until you receive a return signal.
The problem is that if the signal is artificial, is that we don't know what type of data was transmitted, why it was transmitted , and how it was transmitted. From the video, its guessing like this was a single sideband (SSB) transmission on a channel 50 Khz off of 1420 Khz that had a 10 Khz bandwidth and was used because the 1420 Khz area of the spectrum is low background noise. If this was a point to point signal such a laser or as a directional wifi comms such as getting internet to a house on a an island a couple miles off shore, we were just lucky to cross in the path of the signal. We do not know where the the source point was, we do not know where the destination was or even if we were behind or in front of the destination point. If this was a very narrow beam meant for a third party instead of us, there would be no reason to point the signal beam at the earth again. This could have been a laser pointer someone was using while standing on a train pointing at a car that we just walked in front of for 72 seconds while looking at the right direction on a moonless night.
@@genegayda3042 It takes a lot of energy to broadcast through space unless it's focused as a laser. Our radio/TV broadcasts can't even be distinguished from background noise after a few lightyears traveling through space due to inverse square law. Unless that WOW signal was intentionally sent to earth, I doubt we will ever see it again. The fact that it's so close to 1420 Khz makes me think the source is a laser radio transmitter that's randomly sweeping through the stars in hopes of getting a response. Whoever/whatever is transmitting is much more likely to get a response than we are to ever hear from it again.
The Wow signal is more likely than not some kind of natural phenomenon, like a neutron star collission whose quasar was aimed right towards earth or crossed earth's path, and the tail end of that emission was detected by the emitter.
Nobody addresses the huge signal strength. That alone argues for a terrestrial origin. What would it take to generate a signal like that from even the nearest star in the suspected directions?
I did the math. If the aliens had a telescope the same size as Big Ear and were 1000 lightyears distant (just to pick a number), they'd need a transmit power of 46.7 trillion watts to achieve the signal that was seen. That's over 14 times the total power generation capacity of our entire planet. At 100 light years, they'd need 467 billion watts. At 10 light years they'd need 4.67 billion watts.
One Question: the original Wow! Signal paper shows a 6 and a 7 being circled by a couple detector channels off of the Wow! signal line in Channel 2. Have scientists ever tried to explain if that was connected to it since the original researcher circled that too as significant. Or were 6s and 7s not as rare as the rest and circled frequently? Edit: Sorry I deleted my original comment because of a typo without realizing he replied to it. Here was the original reply from Cool Worlds: "That’s a great question and I have no idea because the records aren’t digitized anywhere as far as I know. If they were we could actually determine that from the ensemble of measurements"
i'd never heard of Robert till i watched this and when i learned he was the first amateur to get time at the VLA i gave out a 'get in there'. only to be saddened when i learned of his death, such a shame he never got to see the finish of his work, i hope of course we find out about the WOW and Roberts name's forever linked to it
12:02 Just stumbled on this channel out of the blue. As a scientist myself, I have to say how much I admire you translating your work into this highly accessible public-facing format. That is really really cool. You don't see many actual researchers here on TH-cam. Should be more. :)
"The observatory wasn't set up to .... AM/FM modulation" - interestingly, if the sample rate were higher (than the 5 or 6 samples observed in the 72 seconds), it would kind of have been able to "detect" modulation. On the FM side, its 10khz channel bandwidth wasn't enough to "decode" a message, but it would have been clear if the frequency was being modulated.
The signal wasn’t caught from the beginning of transmission we actually caught the wow signal about 3/4 of the way through, so yeah we saw modulation but not enough to explicitly say this is communication, still it’s amazing to think if we were mearly seconds or minutes earlier we could have clearly seen a signal pattern:(
@@yun.mp4728 what do you mean we caught the Wow! Signal 3/4 of the way through. How can we tell that from the data? The earth swung the big ear across the sky, through the signal. There can’t be any way to tell the actual duration of the signal only it has to be at least longer than 72 seconds, and possibly less than 3 minutes or the second ear could have detected it (50% odds the first ear detected the signal)
Fun fact, my back of the envelope calculation says "it's the sun". 360 deg /24 hrs = 15 deg/hr =0.25 deg/min * 72/60 length of signal in min = 0.30 deg width of the signal *60 to turn it to arc minutes = 18 arc mins size static object ~= 30 arc min (the width of the sun according to google quoting nasa) plus the sun is burning hydrogen which should be in the near enough range(or i misunderstood what he was explaining) The reason it was only in one ear, it could have been a passive reflection. And the real signal should be to the left on the graph (double length, double amplitude), because you are looking at the resonance(harmonic) frequency (as the 6 or 8 on the right suggest, because it lines with the peak of the signal, it's just out of band by something like 10-50 khz i need to recount to be more specific, another distance of wow to fluke, but on the other side of wow) and if you double the length, it gets to 36 ark minutes. Assuming that was only the middle peak and the rest was below noise levels. So either the sun or something of the same size in the sky (and 0.3° if you look only at the wow signal as is), 0.5 to 0.6 is 16% error ( if you say the next number is 0-9 on both, then it's between 27.5% and 1.6% error and another ~0.33% from day not exactly 24 hrs ) so my current hypothesis at the high accuracy end is just as accurate as his probability. And a nice coincidence the width of the signal is 72 sec, and so is the width of the window we are looking from (72 sec from what he said), (i'm getting 1/15 mins from the rotation of earth for 1 minute over 1 arc minute opening, as stated, if 3 minutes apart and are as shown in the diagram, (width/15) if openings rotated by 90° individually )
@@opiesmith9270 if you look up the Wow signal the data we caught from it the signal was only a slice of the actual full transmission of the signal itself, if we had caught the data slightly later we could have had enough data to coherently say the modulation rose in a pattern typical to that of broadcasting out from a relay. Edit: sorry I understand this didn’t really answer your question, there is no way to tell without the missing data. We caught 72 seconds of wow it’s transmission was indeed way longer.
@@ГеоргиГеоргиев-с3г @opie smith haha wow you know your frequencies dude! I don’t know a lot about frequency but it was understood that wow peaked over those 72 seconds like you said, so that would be your answer as to how we know the length of the transmission?
I've watched this video every night to fall asleep to and each night I think I'll comment tomorrow but always forget so I'm doing it now I think it's great how you mention the actual person who discovered the signal. I've watched space stuff constantly for the past 6 years on TH-cam and seen plenty on the wow signal and not once did anyone say it was found by a member of the public never mind naming the guy. Props to you guys for giving him the credit he deserves
What if the wow signal was an alien signal but it was sent by mistake? Would it be preferable to see the Wow signal repeat but from a very different part of the sky, and we can link it to a natural phenomena?
Greetings from Greece! Such a nicely presented video about such an important Astronomy subject. Cool Worlds raises the bar for You Tube videos!!! Great job! Thank you for being so comprehensive and informative.
Could it be a case of human influence in some way? Somebody manually sending a signal directly to the observatory on purpose for some reason? Perhaps a cruel practical joke or a scientist trying to get more funding for bigger and better equipment? I hate to be such a naysayer, but without a repeat event it's hard to believe it came from an intelligent source unless that intelligence was here on Earth with their own selfish motivations. Regardless I feel like this was the best video explaining the Wow! Signal as well as the mystery surrounding it. It's also really cool you got to work with Robert. Excellent production as always. The world of science needs people like you to make it interesting and understandable. I love all your work.
I’ve also wondered if it could have been spoofed, but I think for that to be the case the spoofer would need to at least generally understand how Big Ear worked, build a narrow band transmitter tuned to 1420, aim it at a single horn, and then send the signal in a perfect bell curve. Further, they’d have to be ‘committed to the bit’ by never doing it a second time, nor leaking their prank to anyone. Likely? No. More likely than an alien signal? It would seem so.
@@truthsmiles I was thinking the same thing actually. Someone who knows how the big ear works would be the only likely culprit. Not like some kids with a laser pointer could pull it off, not saying that would even work of course but just as an example that is relatable. It would make it easier to get a bigger ear so to speak if you need it to search for a wow signal. The funding process of all these research facilities is a really big motivator for the people running them I would imagine. Desperate people take desperate measures. It's also so strange that only one horn picked it up. Would be hard to get a fake signal into both horns I would imagine.
@@JonnoPlays Let's assume a scientist working at Big Ear who is willing to do whatever it takes to get funding comes up with a scheme to create the Wow! signal... I would think building a small handheld low-power transmitter that operates on 1420 MHz and just sends noise or a sine wave would be well within the scientist's capabilities. Then, while no one is around, they could walk right up to the horn and, following a bell curve of sorts, turn the signal up and then down over 72 seconds while holding the device inches from the horn. Completely feasible, IMO. BUT, does that really achieve the objective? First, as far as I know, no new funding came of it (maybe I'm wrong about that?). And second, to get more funding, wouldn't it make sense to make it more convincing? Like, why not do both horns? And then, why not repeat it in the future? Maybe even clip the signal partway through one of the bell curves to make it seem to abruptly cut off - you know, something to more strongly suggest intelligent life? Idk, it just seems to me if it was a spoof, it could have been done better? Also, I'd think we'd know by now... some 90 year old guy would have written a confession to be opened after his death to say he did it to try and save the project. I know everyone isn't like me, but I'd have a hard time living with the knowledge that my 'little white lie' misled the entire world for 50 years.
Given what we now know about the way science works... Have we eliminated hardware faults? Seeing how cosmic rays can interfere with electronics I want to look into this possibility of fault. My gut reaction is that there couldn't be a forced bit flip to create the signal for the length of the observation. I still want to bring this up for the comments...
It always tickles me that there's a telescope called "The Very Large Array". On this basis, I'm disappointed that the Australians didn't call theirs the "Crikey! What a Whopper!" Radio Telescope.
We also have the "Very Large Telescope (VLT)", the "Extremely Large Telescope (ELT)" and the "Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL)". Alas, they decided to do the ELT instead of the OWL.
This entire statistical anaylsis doesnt even have to relate to an artifical origin at all. The signal happened, whether natural or artifical. If only one signal ever came, its unlikely we just happened to detect it. If theres more, its unlikely we havent detected more. Just adds to the intrigue.
Staying curious, sir! Fascinating video. I look at it this way: As I understand it, the primary detractor of this and other interesting signals over the years is that it has only been detected once without repeat. But here’s the thing… Often I make a phone call or receive a phone call to/from a person I will only speak with them once, and with our business concluded, I have no reason to speak with them again. That certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t exist; it certainly doesn’t mean that he/she doesn’t exist. It means I have no reason to repeat the call.
They also don't have to establish first contact over lightyears without a shared language or agreed means of comunication. It's silly to send one signal and expect someone to respond. If you want someone to pick up the phone you don't shine a window into their bedroom one night and then wait. You'd keep flashing it until they send you something back or something at least.
@@solsystem1342 True, although that assumes that the signal was meant for us and we didn’t answer. I would tend to assume the signal had nothing to do with us, but we just happened to observe it. (Or it is wasn’t a signal at all.) Anything is possible.
There being one detection has nothing to do with how many times the source may or may not have sent it. It has to do with the fact that we can't confirm a signal that is only RECEIVED once.
@@stargazer7644 - Yes, I understand that that’s the standard. But my point is that the standard doesn’t really prove or disprove anything. But then neither does the signal itself. It’s evidence, but by no means proof. So, one is left to ponder “what if…?” - but it shouldn’t be discounted simply because it remains an open question without an answer.
@@MoonjumperReviews Of course it would prove something. If the signal is received more than once, it proves a lot of things. If it is received by two different telescopes it rules out pretty much all terrestrial RFI or hardware problems, and proves the target is in space and confirms where it is. That's WHY we need confirmation. If you don't have confirmation you don't really have anything.
Amazing! I was too young to remember the ‘Wow’ signal in real time but have learned about it since. Carl Sagan’s book ‘Contact’ is one of my favs……. I was never great at maths but love everything to do with the universe, planets, and their mysteries and I love checking in to the NASA deep space network and watch the signals being sent to Voyager from Tidbinbilla radio telescope in Canberra, here in Australia or when it’s receiving a signal from Voyager- so special as the expectation is that there’s only a few years left when we may be able to detect Voyager’s signal at all …… just extraordinary ….. 😊😊😊🇦🇺
If it was a narrow beam aimed somewhere specific and Earth just happened to pass through it, the only way to see it again would be to send a probe to wherever Earth was on that day in 1977. That point is (very roughly, assuming 45 years ago and the Sun moving at 200 km/sec through the galaxy) 285 billion kilometers away (about 1900 AU or .03 light years). Best get started.
Thank you for that thought-provoking and highly informative video. The standard of your Cool Worlds videos is simply outstanding! I have no scientific training but hugely enjoy your presentations, so thank you once again for all the effort you put into them.
I've never commented. I dont know why, but all I got to say is you are my favorite educational youtuber. Maybe because you are credible? You cite your sources and you're an astronomical physicist? Or is it your enthralling voice combined with your ability to coherently articulate the insanity of the cosmos? Idk but mad love ❤️
Remember that the Arecibo message was only sent once and was more of a tech demonstration than a real shot at sending a message. IF we assume that the WOW signal is the product of an alien intellgence, it might be a reasonable assumption that it too was some sort of test or otherwise unintentional random signal that we were just lucky to receive. But then again that could imply that we should see similar random signals fairly regularly.
Off - topic ... As a (very) amateur astronomer, I was deeply saddened at what happened to Arecibo ... Personally, despite its limitations, I think rebuilding it is key, especially as was the integral part of the global radio astronomical network that created a synthetic radio telescope on an incredible scale ... I can imagine that an Arecibo 2.0, plus updates to the VLA, would only strengthen that ... Even if governments are reluctant, I am - perhaps too hopeful - that a global effort in crowdfunding, especially given astronomy is a global effort, may just work ...
For a interstellar signal of the strength to reach us, it will have to be pointed towards us. And, due to how earth rotates and revolves, and how even stars move, it is possible that we were aligned with that planet for just few minutes which got luckily picked up by the Big Ear. And, next time we align will be many many years later. Alternatively, if it is a purposeful signal some aliens sent specifically in our direction, then they wouldn't know we are intelligent beings. They may have detected bio-signature from far away and they may have a long list of planets that has life on them. But they may not be able to detect that there is intelligent life here. So, they may be beaming signals purposefully for few hours at each of the planets one by one, and we only picked up the starting of one such attempt. They simply moved on to their next planet on the list.
17:00 What if we're thinking in too small time scales? What if it is a patterned repeating signal, but on much larger scales, with each individual transmission just comprising one "blip" of the overall pattern. Perhaps it appears to be a random distribution until you get the full image, at which point it may have been transmitting at the interval for describing the structure of an oxygen atom with all its electron clouds, but with each blip being the WoW signal at the hydrogen line to confirm its artificial. Or it might even be transmitting at the specific frequencies for each atom it's trying to represent. Perhaps it blips at the hydrogen frequency, then blips at the following elements.
could be just a unmistakable signal , send by a alien station that has the sole purpose of sending the same signal towards a massive list of planets that could harbor life. we do not know what timescale they live by, or how big the list is. its purpose could be to only signal a, hey we are intelligent life, for the sole reason they had not found any themselves, and or after they found a signal of the same sort they simply stopped with the project. whatever it is , it is mind boggling that this signal has been put off as, anything other than alien life.
Thank you very much for this very special video, dear Prof. Kipping. It's great and impressive how you explain this and remember this dedicated scientist. I will not forget that and hope that the hopes you expressed come true.
@@viperracing2889 I'm getting so much second-hand embarassment watching you so confidently mix up two different stories in the replies of nearly every comment on this video. If I was you I'd just delete my entire youtube account.
It's because is is an extreme needle in a haystack problem. Even if we had a million dishes around the world looking constantly, we'd be surveying an infinitesimally small part of the possible search space. Each antenna can only view an extremely small piece of sky, and can only listen to a tiny fraction of the radio spectrum in that small piece of sky. Even if we knew for sure someone out there is sending a signal, the odds are we'd never find it. Are you willing to spend huge sums of money on something like that? Or would you rather invest it in something more likely to give you a return on your investment?
Another approach: If the signal is periodic indeed, but the transmission is operated manually, not automatically, one could make the rough assumption that it would repeat at the same rate of the day-night-cycle of the earth-like planets within the observed region. Meaning: Observe all the earth-like planets within that region, estimate the duration between days, apply the rate to your emulated model, see what comes out. One could even use a single day as the smallest time unit and look for rates that correspond to every second day, or third day, or astronomical year. It's not a conclusive approach at all, but might be worth trying.
Love your videos Mr. KIPPING. I'm just a normal gen-x'er non scientific dude. Most of the time I don't understand half of the science stuff u say, but i am learning. The computers in your opening are older than most people who watch your channel....lol. I wish I had professor's back in my day like you.
@John This man is a genius, i too don't understand half of what he says but he sure is just so good at what he does that i can't stop watching...I also learn more with him every time I watch his videos...There is lots of us that would love to have him as our professor... Blessings to you all from Puerto Rico with lots of love
Dr. Kipping: Just wanted to say, thank you personally for this video. You of all people I'd expect to call the Wow! signal dead. Your unfailing inquiry into the truth is amazing. I have my personal beliefs, and have shared them on social media, but you were the inspiration and I thank you for that. Stay curious. Stay awesome.
The Event Horizon channel has excellent content on this topic. He talks about why the signal may have no need to repeat if we had captured the entire burst. Another thing to note is every signal Earth has sent into space never repeated, and we have no intention of ever doing so.
The significance of the fact that the signal didn't repeat has nothing to do with how many times the source did or did not send it. It has to do with the fact that a signal that is only RECEIVED once cannot be confirmed.
I love how we say it can only be an alien signal if it repeats but our own signal we sent out was done once. That's all. So anyone who received our artificially generated signal and sat there waiting for it to repeat is going to be as disappointed as we are with the WOW signal. Perhaps once is all any civilization sends out a message.
if the wow signal is alien in nature, of some kind, it would really have to be pointed right at us - the thing we sent out was not pointed at any specific planet or even star system. (edit, its is highly unlikely anything will ever properly get what we sent out, it was not powerful enough and it will too spread out before it gets to where it was pointed)
Talk about existential seems here on earth that holds true once may be all there is time for civilizations to announce they are/were here
@@LDrosophila And that's probably all it could amount to in the foreseeable future. The time delays are generations long at the very shortest distances.
We're looking for a dedicated first contact transition. Like a laser array that flashes the first 1000 prime numbers in binary (or probably something better thought out). Sending one pulse could just as easily be a interference or equipment error and therefore is an unlikely strategy for any intelligent life to employ.
Our METI efforts thus far have largely been stunts. No one actually expects someone to detect our signals that would have missed the obvious biosignatures in our planet's atmosphere.
With JWST we would be able to see ourselves from further away then our signal has "reached" (even though it's fainter then you could reasonably expect anyone to pick up on).
@@xBINARYGODx true but if a message is beamed point to point to candidate stars in a pattern, it would take far less power and it could be done. Hell if we were able to hear the wow signal just two more times, we could even figure out how many planets were being targeted by the sender, because if the signal durtion was 72 seconds and reorient transmit, we could get a ballpark estimate of how many planets that signal is trying to reach out to, and that would be amazing.
All said and done, it's a trippy subject and these things could be done. However as another commenter pointed out, this all depends on a sender that is rotating the message locations and continuously sending. We as humans have only ever point broadcast once. and its entirely possible the sender did the same. What this really means is, for any realistic chance of picking up the signal again, we'd have to poitn to at least one civilization that was doing it consistently... ie us. So I think the rational argument is that we file away the wow until we start broadcasting point to point to at least a collection of systems.. because we'll be able to realistic say.. well, we did it... so...
We can't say the WOW signal didn't repeat. It could've repeated ten times. The array that captured it was flat and scanned the sky using the rotation of the earth. So they had to wait a full 24 hours just to get back to that general region of space. We'll never know. It very well could've kept going or been going for some time before it was detected.
Weren't there other observatories which didn't pick it up?
@@timoteubert7068 As far as I know, no other telescopes were on that patch of space but the Big Ear, though I believe they asked other telescopes to focus on it once the Big Ear wasn't facing that direction anymore, and they didn't capture anything.
They have looked in that direction since and haven't captured it again. So, my point was, we don't know how long that signal could've been repeating before it was detected. We can't say it didn't repeat or that it wasn't longer. Earth's telescopes only caught the 70 seconds or whatever it was.
We know the signal stopped because the second receiver didn't hear it when it swept the same location in space 3 minutes later - the signal was gone and was never heard again despite lots of looking.
Great point elf girl. I have seen a few black eyed people on here and now an elf. Lol TH-cam is crazy, all kinds of supernatural people post here 😮
@@stargazer7644It could have repeated before it was originally detected - it may have been sent once or twice shortly before the final time when it was detected
It’s crazy to think the WOW! signal is still out there, traveling through space, now 46 light years away from us. It blows my mind to think about where it is from and how it came to us. And what are the odds that the telescope caught it when it did… wild.
Could be a million light years until another civilization picks it up, and even then it could be many millions of years before that when it was originally sent.
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@@tylerk3616It won't happen. Every time it doubles the distance it has gone, the signal gets 4 times weaker. Every time it goes 10 times farther, it gets 100 times weaker. Eventually the signal will become weaker than the background noise of the universe, and will be lost forever. Based on how strong it was when we heard it, it can only go about 5 times farther before it is lost in the noise. It is quite possibly already gone.
Not if it came from very far away. 😉 Q
77 was an awesome year. We had the Voyager launches, Starwars, and the WOW signal!
I sung a solo in 1977 of the Bee Gees song, How Deep Is Your Love! 1977 was a good year!!
@@emzywillrich7243 I love this comment :')
There is the answer. Too much of a coincidence. Obviously it was a joke by someone because of the Star Wars movie, the signal was human made.
So, 2 out of three great events?
#SWsucks
also the year of the biggest earthquake ever in my country (one of the worst earthquake disasters of the 1970's around the world)
The deep field pictures get me. Staring at all those galaxies we could be looking at millions of civilizations. And the fact that our observable universe is a miniscule fraction of whats supposedly out there gives me chills.
millions of likely now long-dead civilizations, too
I would bet everything I have that there are aliens. Maybe even one thinking exactly what I'm thinking right now, up too late on their alien phone.
NASA is complicit in the UAP cover-up, and they've stagnated the field of Astrobiology.❤
@@thingonathinginathing why would NASA attempt to cover that up though?
@_apsis I don't know, perhaps it is because of the massive implications or their own invested interests. But they are complicit in the cover-up.
Rest in peace Robert Gray. I hope one day we find out what the “wow” signal was. We owe this one to Robert!
Don't tell anyone, but it was a gravitational microlensing event, basically a massive cosmic object, star, black hole, or otherwise, passed between Earth and a distant radio source (galaxy, quasar, white hole, ect.), temporarily aligning in such a way that the object's gravitational field acted as a lens. This lensing effect magnified and focused the radio waves from the distant source, resulting in a brief, intense burst of radio waves that was detected by the Big Ear telescope. The transient and singular nature of this event aligns well with the characteristics of gravitational microlensing, where the unique alignment of the observer, lens, and source amplifies the signal in a temporary and unrepeatable way, but also debris and interference can make the detection appear narrow field.
@@amelliamendel2227 That’s fascinating. Where can a moron like me learn more about this?
@@WheresPoochie I guess if you were actually interested in the underlying principles of gravitational microlensing search for a paper titled "Microlensing mass measurement from images of rotating gravitational arcs" it's got the basic principles of gravitational microlensing and it's use for measuring the mass of isolated, really faint, or non-luminous objects in the galaxy. If you're seriously asking about microlensing and it's effects on distant radio sources, The Cosmic Lens All Sky Survey (CLASS) in New Mexico, has made some discoveries you could look into and if you're just interested in the radio frequency aspects then "Astrophysical Applications of Gravitational Microlensing", is a collection of open source papers and if you look through the references you'll find one that's a thesis and that's the one you want, but I can't remember his name, sorry.
@@WheresPoochie I guess if you were actually interested in the underlying principles of gravitational microlensing search for a paper titled "Microlensing mass measurement from images of rotating gravitational arcs" it's got the basic principles of gravitational microlensing and it's use for measuring the mass of isolated, really faint, or non-luminous objects in the galaxy. If you're seriously asking about microlensing and it's effects on distant radio sources, The Cosmic Lens All Sky Survey (CLASS) in New Mexico, has made some discoveries you could look into and if you're just interested in the radio frequency aspects then "Astrophysical Applications of Gravitational Microlensing", is a collection of open source papers and if you look through the references you'll find one that's a thesis and that's the one you want, but I can't remember his name, sorry.
@@WheresPoochie I guess if you were actually interested in the underlying principles of gravitational microlensing search for a paper titled "Microlensing mass measurement from images of rotating gravitational arcs" it's got the basic principles of gravitational microlensing and it's use for measuring the mass of isolated, really faint, or non-luminous objects in the galaxy. If you're seriously asking about microlensing and it's effects on distant radio sources, The Cosmic Lens All Sky Survey (CLASS) in New Mexico, has made some discoveries you could look into and if you're just interested in the radio frequency aspects then "Astrophysical Applications of Gravitational Microlensing", is a collection of open source papers and if you look through the references you'll find one that's a thesis and that's the one you want, but I can't remember his name, sorry.
Little known fact: radio astronomer Jerry R. Ehman was looking at the printout upside down when he noticed the signal data. He then wrote ¡MOM, wanting to show his findings to his mother later. The rest, as they say, is history.
Joking aside, this was a fascinating topic that hopefully continues receiving attention from the scientific community.
I wonder if his mother was very proud
@@nickscurvy8635 After all this time, it turns out it was actually the work of Tommy Tallarico, the inventor of Alien Signals.
@@lnhp5592 he was the first terrestrial to work on extraterrestrial signals.
@@lnhp5592 tommy actually holds a guiness universe record for the most extraterrestrial signals worked on.
NASA is complicit in the UAP cover-up, and they've stagnated the field of Astrobiology.❤❤❤
this video gave me goosebumps...RIP Robert Gray, excellent analysis. Let's get to 1500 hours of study on the Wow signal!!!
I only understand maybe 10% of the content of Cool Worlds videos, but i am absolutely glued to the screen for 100% of my time watching them. I am so grateful that such diligence and brain power is given to these subjects, even if i struggle to immediately understand what i’m watching. Keep up the great work 👍
yah i know what you mean. i think a high iq is required to fully understand is channels videos. us middle iq people are better off going elsewhere on our level
Fr fr
I completely with you. I could only dream of having this level of knowledge. It makes me sad to feel so dumb
@@gabrielM1111nah don’t say that. a number like iq can’t quantify a persons ability to enjoy content like this. even if it’s hard to understand, it’s worth continuing to watch and support. don’t sell urself short. if all of us average folk could grasp this easily we’d all be astronomers and maybe someone would’ve found the next Wow signal by now 😂
All I get is the wow signal didn't repeat itself. Everything else he saying is alien to me.
It seems insane to me that we don't have observatories constantly scanning the same part of the sky.
Observatory's are expensive to run, require specialized personnel to operate, take years to show results, and whilst all data on space is useful, to the less educated and enlightened members of the population ( *Glances at evangelicals and the many inanities of hardliner religions quoting thousand year old texts as if they still hold meaning today* ), such facilities are a "waste of money better used on Earth"
There is ALOT of sky, and there are MANY interesting things to look at. Even If we took only the observatories we would needed to watch that one point for a year we would miss out on thousands of other significant events.
If we knew there was alien contact on the other end of that project it would be worth it 100%. But the evidence isn't there to dedicate that kind of time to one small spot when there is so much going on in the universe.
@@Shinzon23 lol the immediate jump to blame religion rather than blaming the fact that almost all public funds are being allocated to the military-industrial complex and half-assed public services that don’t even work but somehow manages to suck up all funding.
Even if religion up and disappeared tomorrow, there’s no way the budget for space exploration increases. Congress would sooner buy shiny cool explody shit from LMT than increase space exploration funding. Unless it’s space militarization of course.
The only way we get more funding for space exploration is if China starts getting serious about space exploration. Nothing like a good cold war space race.
Right now, space exploration is a “oh i guess that’s cool” in most people’s minds… people just don’t think it’s a priority because of all the immediate problems that we must overcome right now. War in ukraine ring any bell to you?
@@TheFinagle I don’t think there’s that many events out in the universe that require a “right now!” type of observation and the events that do are usually rare and don’t happen every day. Events get follow up observations depending on how much importance they’re given, so it means this event was only given that much importance and after initial observations it was deemed no longer important.
@@Hartbreak1 An event doesn't have to be rare to be significant. There's a lot of space and there's ALWAYS several things we could be learning or seeing, but we only have so many instruments and can only watch a very small amount of the sky at a time.
We miss so much just because we were not looking right at it at the right time, and this signal is just one in a long list of things we could be watching instead of the things we did watch.
Wait... You mean to tell me there has only been a relatively few HOURS of subsequent observation of the relevant area? WTF! Dude I would have never guessed that. We should have receivers pointed there at all times for at least 5-10 years minimum. If that is a directional transmitter on an Exoplanet it could take centuries before the planet comes back around to point towards us. At the very least they should give it a decade before giving up but it feels like they literally just gave up the moment it happened with just random observations here or there because someone was bored.
Bonkers isn't it? I hope as satellites and the like get cheaper, some millionaire with an interest in this can comission a simple satellite that just looks for the WOW signal that uses its height and lack of atmosphere watch continuously for Wow.
@scalpel Given the strength and the fact it was blue shifted it would be wise for the government to care. If you are getting potential alien signals strong enough to suggest they are rather close and the shift of the slight suggest its getting even closer it be a good idea to follow up and either identify or rule out just so you don't have and surprises showing up on your door step in a few decades.
Of course this is an anectdota assumption
Its intentionally suppressed. Why would this be any different?
@@peterwarnett whats suppressed? Aliens? Bro gimme a break. Every government in the world wants to be the first to report they found alien life so much so that they jumped the gun and reported they found it when we found what we thought were fossils from Mars that turned out to be ferro compounds. made naturally. Every other year someone's reporting they found alien signals which turn out to be bull. Governments would literally kill to show their superiority by being first to find alien life but they haven't yet. All that cover up stuff is to hide blackops aircraft not aliens.
“DO NOT ANSWER. DO NOT ANSWER.”
That scene was one of the scariest I've ever seen. If the dark forest theory is true, the universe is terrifying. If not, less so.
Whats the reference
*grabs the mic and keys in, gives a grumpy face*
«This is F4PATA to unidentified station please QRA, over»
@@cleaver5000 3 body problem, I would recommend the book but the Netflix show is also good enough
@@Beez-go-buzz Prime has the original Chinese version, which is markedly better and more thorough.
Amazing that you two were able to collab before he passed. I hope you and others are able to keep the dream alive, just as he and others have.
This video is such a gem! Sorry to hear Robert Gray passed away. Respect for doing real science and publishing along with educating the public. It is one of the few, rare youtube channels in this regard. The quality of the video is exceptional, as always! Live long and prosper, prof. David Kipping!
You do a really great job of making science seem like a "collective human endeavour," like it's a journey and process that we're all undertaking to some extent, and we're all progressing in.
It's nice. I'm not sure if I 100% agree, but it's a nice sentiment.
I mean, practically we are all working towards our scientific understanding. At least it seems that way to me. For basically our entire existence our progress has been tied to scientific understanding. We've been wrong a lot but we keep being wrong less.
Here’s the thing; no matter what branch of science you’re exploring or making discoveries in, and no matter what purpose, it’ll all adds to and benefits the collection human knowledge. So in a sense, it is.
I’d argue most of society contributes to science by simply being an active part of society. How would scientists discover anything beyond the basics without the world we’ve collectively built around them?
No he doesn't there's far far superior videos and documentaries on the subject
Since the 1970s we have spent about a week looking at this region of space for another signal. That is what’s WOW!
Its insane
Can't one of our holy billionaire s pop for 5-8 dishes scattered across the globe to monitor... I believe you can buy a 5 meter antenna for less than a million installed
@@acmelka I don't think a 5 meter dish would detect the WOW signal. Gray's backyard dish probably never had a chance. The Big Ear's dish was 21 by 110 meters, 2300 square meters. A quarter that size should have still detected it, say 600. If today's Low Noise Amplifiers are 30 times as good as what they used in the 1970s then, yes, a 20 square meter antenna would work.
@@EinsteinsHair thanks. I know one billionaire who wasted 40 billion on wrecking a app.... If only
@@acmelka if you're talking about musk, he was forced to buy twitter, twitter basically hoodwinked him and overexaggerated the value of the company and some things that made musk want to buy it in the first place, in the end, he tried to back out of the deal, but was forced into it... so
It seems like one more potential hope for it being an ET signal would be that you can't just ignore signals that don't repeat, or repeat extremely rarely, because it doesn't account for how many other potential sources of non/rarely-repeating signals there may be. So, in essence, they would have a shorter repeating interval, but that interval would be based on the density of intelligent life producing signals like this. You could even estimate the density of intelligent life from the assumption that this is a non-repeating signal from intelligent life. Something like arecebo planetary radar sweeping through another star system looking for asteroids, just happening to be directed at us at just the right time, so it could never repeat from the same source, but another civilization might do the same thing in the future.
I think we tend to assume too much about alien behavior and alien technology. We should be just as skeptical of the naysayers as we are of unconfirmed positive results. Our concepts of aliens is nearly 100% speculation. When it comes to civilization-building species, we only have ourselves as a reference point. We have a compass but no map. There is no such thing as an alien expert, but so-called experts like to have their reasoned-out hypotheses about aliens and are quick to dismiss anything outside of those boundaries. Maybe these particular aliens don't have a reason to make orderly repeating signals. Maybe they think Dyson Spheres are a bad idea. Maybe their technology works in a way we can't imagine and we simply can't pick up their signals with our current technology. Maybe their very biology works in a way we've never considered. We can really only make assumptions based on what we know and what we think we still have to learn. Despite our advancements in the past few hundred years, our ignorance is possibly infinite and anything we think we know is potentially false.
@@TheGreenKnight500 but one of the facts was that the signal can only be artificially created
Owie my brains…
Well you may be glad to know seti has been sending out signals to space giving info of are planet's location in the milkyway.altho I fully agree that this is a terrible idea n despite there warnings they do it anyways
Also u are 100 %correct we may have a better chance with a.i going through the data and see if it can depict if it's created by alien life forms. But as you said we have no idea what they could be how they are or the way they may speak if they even speak. Why would we assume they created radios and use radio waves at all
This is the most comprehensive treatment of the WOW signal on TH-cam. Geared for the non physicist.
Thank you for the great work!
Thank you, Professor! My mind is challenged without being overwhelmed. The implications of the subject matter are some of the most profound questions ever asked. I thoroughly enjoy how much I learn with each and every video. With gratitude and admiration.
I share your enjoyment, Anthony! And this makes now 3 videos from you, Prof. Kipping where i could not hold back my tears - because the amount of emotions you put into those videos is something I've felt my whole about astronomy, but could so far barely find anyone who shares that - until now. Thank you very much!!
@hey human every system has its manuel- in order to master it- you must understand all its compositions- for humans the catalogue of the earth should be demmanded otherwise it's just trying after trying without getting anywhere .
Anthony Gross.. pseudo intellectual!
I have a question, professor. Doesn't lack of new detection of the wow signal also reduce the probability that the signal is from some natural phenomenon?
11:51
The fact that it was a narrowband signal mostly eliminates all natural phenomena. Only technology generates narrowband signals. So then the signal was either interference from our own technology, or from alien technology.
It’s possible that an unknown natural phenomenon could produce a narrowband signal
@@stargazer7644 Those are certainly two possibilities, but your inability to think of a third, fourth, or fifth possibility doesn't make your conclusion meaningful. That's a fallacy I see a lot in research. "I can't think of another explanation, so my conclusion is therefore correct."
@@beenaplumber8379 It's called having the ability to reason. You apply it to the known facts and it gives you the logical hypotheses.
A lot of this is beyond my understanding, but you explained it effectively enough that I've been able to follow along and be as excited as you seem! Thank you.
Such a perfect outro for him. Not only is he the core of whatever answer we find, but his family, children or even a brother of his, can benefit from his mission. This is something we all want. His book sales will not only feed this final answer in the future but also feed those whom he loved.
The videos you produce to the standard that you do, bring me more peace and hope than words can articulate. I wish, when I was in high school, that science & physics were taught in the same engaging and awe inspiring format that you do.
Thank you so much, you’re a truly gifted educator 👏🏽
Rest easy Rob, you’ve got the best man on the job to take over your hard work and passion 🖤
Well said, exactly my thoughts
Hear, hear! Couldn't agree more!
Thanks for those kind words, I hope this video does Gray’s memory justice.
Ditto
@@CoolWorldsLab "I hope this video does Gray’s memory justice."
Rest assure, it most certainly does.
I absolutely love your storytelling style. It really inspires me in my own videos. Thank you for bringing so much class to space-content creators👌
45 years is but a blink in time. And perhaps, the Wow signal was not intended for us at all. For example, as a mariner, we typically keep the VHF on channel 16...the general hailing freq. But often when you wish to have a more private conversation with another sailor, once the chan. 16 hail has been acknowledged, we switch to another freq. to keep 16 open. So....maybe the Wow signal was just such a request for a freq. change between communicators.
Signal message translation: “Is your refrigerator running?”
That's what I think happened. The Big Ear receiver picked up a radio signal that wasn't meant for Earthlings but we accidentally picked it up by chance because the receiver was in the exact spot at the exact right time to pick it up.
While I don’t agree that Wow can be “conclusively excluded” based on repeatability (owning to the fact that our own signals to the universe have never been repeated)..I am pleasantly surprised to see Cool Worlds increasingly discuss the 👽 topic. Please continue.
@Raistlin Majere Hm not sure..I’ll have to check it out. Thanks for the recommendation!
If you’re not into spooky aliens/body horror, probably don’t. XD but, is a great series if that’s a non-issue.
This. For some reason we portray aliens as these static beings why are trying to be found. If they are like us, they're transmissions will appear random, un focused and relatively weak, with rand focused transmissions reaching out with no real hope of being detected.
Our radio and TV signals, and now computer signals, go out from Earth every day. This includes reruns of those radio and TV programs, hit movies, etc. So there's some small potential that repeating (rerun, repeat airings) programs could go out along with non-repeating but non-random signals. Would our media survive the distance to other stars? Would it make any sense to aliens? No idea. But it might.
@Cool Worlds What about a model that backs into some drake equation answers by using assumptions like: (1) aliens at the same phase of technology where they would bother to send/receive a Wow signal are like human beings, and would also do a non-repeating for a few mins, (2) data about the region of sky that has been observed/not observed for the four interesting reasons you mention in your video by all radio telescopes including Big Ear and for how long, (3) some other assumptions based on likely number of habitable exoplanets in the galaxy?
My condolences to you and to Robert Gray’s family. May he Rest In Peace. I hope that someone at NASA will take up this research now that they are open to looking into UAPs.
You're just unbelievable, Professor.
In a technical, scientific video, you paid homage to Robert Gray.
Your sense of wonder and mission are invaluable to us.
Thank you.
somewhere, light years away, there’s a 20-something year old alien watching a blooptube video about the infamous GLORP signal that never repeated
They're probably still waiting for a reply.
I actually think "WOW" was some sort of extremely rare natural phenomena, because the signal never repeated. Some part of me hopes it's artificial
I don't think we can say it never repeated. We have looked in, or maybe more accurately listened back to, the area we believe* it came from. But far from continuously. My understanding is that it has NOT been monitored the VAST majority of the time.
*My understanding is that the two horns mean we are not certain which part of the sky it came from. But that may be wrong.
@@timd3469 Valid point. It might have repeated, but we just never caught it.
But didn't he say Robert Gray had a telescope in his backyard specifically to listen for it? Presumably continuously?
@@tabby73 he did, and Robert did. I don't know how much of the possible source area his telescope could cover though. Even if it was 100%, the rotation of the Earth means he is only monitoring it a fraction of the time.
I do hope it was aliens even though I wouldn't bet money on it.
Exactly.The rotation of the Earth precludes the fact that it could ever be continuously monitored from just one telescope.
This is a work of love, dedication and science. As a fellow scientist, in a totally different field, chapeu.
You are a one-of-a-kind scientist and man. Over the last year or so I've become a very big fan of your work. You really put the heart back into human exploration and science.
C'mon Robert, you only needed 1,500. more hours, how rough, and tragic... The footnote that he was the first amateur astronomer granted access to such an array will live on. Thank you man, will read the book!
Love how you “squeeze” everything out of the data, as you said. This video and the one about artificial gravity where you showed the graph of practical spaceships and requirements for artificial gravity on long journeys. Just love seeing all the possibilities instead of just saying “hey this idea is cool”
Standing on the shoulder of a giant...
Yep cause we all got our spaceships in the garage which we can hop in at our leisure right
@@andykod77 FFS, how many said that about cars or cell phones or international air travel, shits gotta start somewhere.
@@jacobvreeland6147 here's hoping right
@@andykod77 OP "thanks for doing thorough and intuitive stats analysis for us"
Andy "but I don't have a spaceship"
I feel like scientists looking for the wow signal was like me waiting for a text back from a girl back when I was single…
I'd like a thought experiment on this, coming from the hypothetical aliens viewpoint. Why would you send the signal? Where would you send it to and how often? Why would you send a narrow beam signal in one direction only? What if their resources are limited and they could not 'afford' to send it in our direction again? (in the same way our telescope resources are limited) - would that even be a thing for a more advanced civilisation? Lots of other questions too about their side of the story.
depending on how far away the source is, a movement as small as tectonic shifts could redirect the signal billions of eventual miles away. so I guess it could be that.
or it could be a spray and pray strategy. maybe due to power limits, orbits or similar. could be literally anything at all depending on how that life evolved to communicate, relate to consciousness or time etc.
🤷♂️
Sorry guys, we are scrapping this project. You get only one chance to do this radio thing, then unfortunately we have to pack it up.
You're assuming it would have to be an intentional signal to other civilizations. We're constantly sending out radio waves from antennas, satellites, into space that anyone could observe
@@shellderp it went from weak to strong to weak again, suggesting that it was a laser emitted from a rotating surface
@@marcopohl3236 I thought the strength was accounted for by our rotation
This video moved me, the craftsmanship of this video, your voice, it's so beautiful.
It seems odd that, as someone who really hates math, that it turns out to be the most accurate portrait of our universe possible. Your analysis moves me to re-enroll next semester. Thanks.
I imagine Robert Gray is resting peacefully knowing that Dr Kipping is continuing the search to WoWs meaning. I would've loved being a fly on the wall when this transmission was seen for the first time. Thank you for creating another amazing video. I adore Cool Worlds and all the content you produce! Thank you!
This is a prank gone horribly wrong. Someone out there has a great burden on their conscience, no doubt. Why doesn't someone do a FOIA request for old military satellite telemetry data?
@@dandeeteeyem2170 Well, why isn’t that “someone” you? Please proceed with your FOIA and report your results here.
@@viperracing2889 - Very clever comment. Love dark humor.
Something I'm not seeing talked about is whether it could have been a direct signal. Could they have simply waved 'Hi' and got no response and moved on? I know METI has been looking into this. We could send 360 burst ping on that channel, but who knows who will hear it, and how long will it take to get there?
With a 100% confidence, it's simply impossible to watch a Cool World's video without tearing up.
I have a question: how many times we sent and repeat the signal?
Even though we did sent a few times, we never repeat it! So from our own behavior we can draw conclusion that repeat of the signal is only way to say it's artificial signal! So answer is no, because we never didn't repeat our own signal!
Secondly if you study the signal it looks like someone/something that sent it, move to the line - we if want to say someone "hey we exist" we would do the same, we would move the frequency, to show it's artificial!
So reverse your thoughts, start from what we would do and what we did till today and if we do decide to send today, what's the best way for someone to recognize us!
If you reverse it everything is matching like a glove !
We would send a repeating signal if it wasn't just for show. It's way easier to show something is artificial when it's like flashing the first 100 digits of pie in binary repeatedly rather then one signal. With energy limitations we might only do it occasionally but, if you stop there's no way for the sender to do follow up and go through the process of decoding, locating, and sending a reply.
Even just a signal that repeats once a day with some weird properties like different lengths and frequencies of transition every day would make it way easier.
The fact that the signal didn't repeat has nothing to do with if the source sent it more than once or not. It has to do with the fact that a signal that was RECEIVED only once cannot be confirmed.
we didn't send any signal meant to be communication, so we can't draw any conclusions from it.
@@daos3300 We've sent multiple signals meant to be communication. The "Arecibo message" sent to M13 is one example.
What a Consistency, What a Quality, What a depth.
I believe the word you're looking for is, Wow!
the best wow analysis i ve ever seen, and mate big respect with how much passion you put in this videos,editing,explaining things etc, thats a true passion, massive respect mate!
Given that this entire video highlights our inability or unwillingness to consistently monitor a region of space that is agreed upon as "the most compelling candidate for an alien radio transmission ever received" -- why would we at all assume an alien species has any consistency in signal casting? It's completely plausible that this is a 1-off signal that an alien species sent directly towards our solar system because they recognized that it has a potentially habitable planet. And it's completely plausible that they assume one transmission is all to takes to get the attention of a sufficiently advanced species. So many of our scientists want to just stop looking in the wow field because nothing ever repeated. How unlikely is it then that alien scientists stopped looking here after we didn't respond? (setting aside the thousands-of-lightyears between us making it virtually impossible to respond anyway)
you have to love the internet, where people think they know more than scientists as to where their focus should be.
They have no way of knowing if we are advanced enough to detect such a signal or that we are even listening, or if they have they know we aren't listening that closely. So in either case they'd repeat it frequently. They are also probably at least a few dozen light years away, maybe much farther. So they haven't seen our radio signals at all yet. They may have a really good telescope that tells them Earth is habitable.
From my naive perspective I find it truly frustrating that we have dedicated just 184 hours of observations to advance our knowledge on this!
I imagine that there is an absurd amount of very compelling studies that need observation time, but it’s such a basic question for humanity that it feels “right” to dedicate more resources to it…
I have always had this curiosity about the Wow! Signal!
I am so glad you are interested as well!
It has always seemed to me that there weren't enough people trying to detect it again or that were at least studying it.
In 1977, I was 10 years old, and I read about the Wow! Signal back then because my father always had a subscription to Scientific America (and other science/tech magazines) in the house. In the Army, my father worked with Radars and Satellites in the Signal Corps.
That would be great news!
Or terrible news if the dark forest theory is true.
Amazing work again, and it definitely gives me some hope for a repeat, but I'm still wondering how does not detecting it again rule out the possibility of a one-off intelligent signal, either something like the one-off messages we've sent into space, or some accidental leakage that won't be directed our way again?
A one-off signal is fully accounted for by this model remember! The probability of someone sending a one off is not that important, the real issue is the probability of detection is infinitesimal. If someone sends one signal out over *all time* (which defines a one off) then the probability of detection is far far far far less likely than some kind of repeating schedule.
@@CoolWorldsLab so essentially the odds of wow being a one-off intelligent signal and us happening to detect that one-off signal would be insanely small?
@@jamesgeary4294 yeah I think it’s saying the odds of us picking up a one off signal is so small that scientifically speaking we couldn’t conclude that is the case.
@@liammoore7122 I wonder then could the same model used to figure out how much more observation time was needed to confirm wow also be used to ask how frequent one-off signals might be if we assume wow is one, and that the Big Ear radio telescope still detected one over its search time? Maybe could be a proxy for how many civilizations are in the galaxy?
@@CoolWorldsLab What if a lot of one-off signals are being sent out? Surely that is not implausible?
Just found this channel. never gonna leave..keep up the great work..greets from Spain
Shed a few tears there at the end.
Thank you, Professor Kipping.
That was an incredible analysis and extremely well explained.
This story is a big lie. They were able to trace the signal to a microwave in the lunch room.
We attempted to signal aliens once: the Arecibo message. It lasted for about 3 minutes. We sent it ONCE. So ... the fact that WOW never repeated does not rule it out, now does it?
It is gold plated and is still available to the aliens if they are interested
no, we didn't attempt to signal aliens. it was a tech demo. if we were actually sending a signal it would repeat.
If it is an alien signal, my first thought was it wasn't meant for us. It was a message from one alien system to another and we briefly got in the way. But the more I thought about that the more unlikely it seemed. Space is so vast that the idea we just happened to drift through the beam seems incredibly unlikely. So what is likely? Maybe the message wasn't meant for us, as in Earth, but it was meant for a receiver in our solar system. A lurker probe somewhere nearby was receiving an update.
Bracewell probe?
If there is one lurking about, it'd have to be operating via a AI with the ability to crank its clock speed/perception of time up and down to let it not go insane from being alone with noone to talk to for potentially hundreds of millions of years.
If the "Wow" signal was a communication attempt to said probe sleepingaway eternity, then either whoever sent it was extremely close to our solar system and focused the signal on where the probe was lurking, or they are extremely confident that a single signal would be enough to wake it.
For the second point, this isn't that out of the realm of possibility; modern nuclear subs (not the tinkertoy pieces of shit the Red Chinese use) are sent ELF and ULF radio signals that are essentially used for nothing more than the equivalent of a few Morse code dots and dashes that tell a particular sub to surface to periscope depth to poke her comms antenna above the water to receive full orders, and the "Wow" signal could be this; a "upon receipt of any sort of message on this frequency,set perceptual time to full and respond back on secured transmission methods to avoid detection" activation signal.
I'd also pray that if it is an activation signal for something lurking in our solar system that it is bracewell probe, not a Von Neumann probe set to Berserker anything nearby when activated, in which case we're all f***** andoing to die and in a tide of infinitely duplicating drones
The wow signal is one of my favorite topics.
The problem I see is that we know that the signal doesn't repeat very often, or we'd have seen it. But it's also been 45 years. Why would an alien spend 45 years (or likely more, if we haven't seen it since, we probably didn't see its first instance) trying to reach us, but only transmit so sporadically? Isn't there a stronger possibility that they have just given up by now? In this case further searching must be fruitless. Or, statistically speaking, the probability of a detection in new observations is not necessarily the same as it was then.
But if it's a terrestrial artifact, it most likely would not repeat either, especially 45 years later. 45 years may or may not be a long time for aliens, but it is for us.
And it doesn't look like a natural signal, but it can't be ruled out, either. Natural signals don't typically repeat erratically, they normally repeat regularly or not at all. But nature is also very patient and if the signal has a period of 45 years or more, it would not be reproducible either. Since we don't know what kind of natural signal could have produced it, it's hard to constrain this.
Unfortunately the most likely outcome of further searching is coming up empty, and this is consistent with all three origins for the signal.
Maybe the signal was't aimed specifically toward Earth in the first place. Let's just play with the thought that there are aliens somewhere in the galaxy and they have no idea that there is life on Earth. They're randomly sending out signals just like I assume we humans do. Maybe we just got lucky that the signal hit Earth in the first place. Perhaps a sign that we just weren't ready to begin with.
I shudder at the thought alone of actually *detecting* a verified alien signal. That would be terrifying and exciting at the same time.
Sending signals long distance is energy intensive, so if you don’t know that technological civilizations are currently in the area then it makes sense to play the long game and transmit infrequently until you receive a return signal.
The problem is that if the signal is artificial, is that we don't know what type of data was transmitted, why it was transmitted , and how it was transmitted. From the video, its guessing like this was a single sideband (SSB) transmission on a channel 50 Khz off of 1420 Khz that had a 10 Khz bandwidth and was used because the 1420 Khz area of the spectrum is low background noise.
If this was a point to point signal such a laser or as a directional wifi comms such as getting internet to a house on a an island a couple miles off shore, we were just lucky to cross in the path of the signal. We do not know where the the source point was, we do not know where the destination was or even if we were behind or in front of the destination point. If this was a very narrow beam meant for a third party instead of us, there would be no reason to point the signal beam at the earth again.
This could have been a laser pointer someone was using while standing on a train pointing at a car that we just walked in front of for 72 seconds while looking at the right direction on a moonless night.
@@genegayda3042 It takes a lot of energy to broadcast through space unless it's focused as a laser. Our radio/TV broadcasts can't even be distinguished from background noise after a few lightyears traveling through space due to inverse square law. Unless that WOW signal was intentionally sent to earth, I doubt we will ever see it again. The fact that it's so close to 1420 Khz makes me think the source is a laser radio transmitter that's randomly sweeping through the stars in hopes of getting a response. Whoever/whatever is transmitting is much more likely to get a response than we are to ever hear from it again.
The Wow signal is more likely than not some kind of natural phenomenon, like a neutron star collission whose quasar was aimed right towards earth or crossed earth's path, and the tail end of that emission was detected by the emitter.
Nobody addresses the huge signal strength. That alone argues for a terrestrial origin. What would it take to generate a signal like that from even the nearest star in the suspected directions?
I did the math. If the aliens had a telescope the same size as Big Ear and were 1000 lightyears distant (just to pick a number), they'd need a transmit power of 46.7 trillion watts to achieve the signal that was seen. That's over 14 times the total power generation capacity of our entire planet. At 100 light years, they'd need 467 billion watts. At 10 light years they'd need 4.67 billion watts.
Thank you for another incredible video
Rage Against the Machine did a cool Wow-Wow too. ;D
th-cam.com/video/3L4YrGaR8E4/w-d-xo.html
That was beautiful, especially the tribute at the end
I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of this video. Thank you.
One Question: the original Wow! Signal paper shows a 6 and a 7 being circled by a couple detector channels off of the Wow! signal line in Channel 2. Have scientists ever tried to explain if that was connected to it since the original researcher circled that too as significant. Or were 6s and 7s not as rare as the rest and circled frequently?
Edit: Sorry I deleted my original comment because of a typo without realizing he replied to it.
Here was the original reply from Cool Worlds: "That’s a great question and I have no idea because the records aren’t digitized anywhere as far as I know. If they were we could actually determine that from the ensemble of measurements"
They highlist all high numbers, it’s just apart of the recording
i'd never heard of Robert till i watched this and when i learned he was the first amateur to get time at the VLA i gave out a 'get in there'. only to be saddened when i learned of his death, such a shame he never got to see the finish of his work, i hope of course we find out about the WOW and Roberts name's forever linked to it
12:02 Just stumbled on this channel out of the blue. As a scientist myself, I have to say how much I admire you translating your work into this highly accessible public-facing format. That is really really cool. You don't see many actual researchers here on TH-cam. Should be more. :)
"The observatory wasn't set up to .... AM/FM modulation" - interestingly, if the sample rate were higher (than the 5 or 6 samples observed in the 72 seconds), it would kind of have been able to "detect" modulation. On the FM side, its 10khz channel bandwidth wasn't enough to "decode" a message, but it would have been clear if the frequency was being modulated.
The signal wasn’t caught from the beginning of transmission we actually caught the wow signal about 3/4 of the way through, so yeah we saw modulation but not enough to explicitly say this is communication, still it’s amazing to think if we were mearly seconds or minutes earlier we could have clearly seen a signal pattern:(
@@yun.mp4728 what do you mean we caught the Wow! Signal 3/4 of the way through. How can we tell that from the data? The earth swung the big ear across the sky, through the signal. There can’t be any way to tell the actual duration of the signal only it has to be at least longer than 72 seconds, and possibly less than 3 minutes or the second ear could have detected it (50% odds the first ear detected the signal)
Fun fact, my back of the envelope calculation says "it's the sun".
360 deg /24 hrs = 15 deg/hr =0.25 deg/min * 72/60 length of signal in min = 0.30 deg width of the signal *60 to turn it to arc minutes = 18 arc mins size static object ~= 30 arc min (the width of the sun according to google quoting nasa) plus the sun is burning hydrogen which should be in the near enough range(or i misunderstood what he was explaining)
The reason it was only in one ear, it could have been a passive reflection. And the real signal should be to the left on the graph (double length, double amplitude), because you are looking at the resonance(harmonic) frequency (as the 6 or 8 on the right suggest, because it lines with the peak of the signal, it's just out of band by something like 10-50 khz i need to recount to be more specific, another distance of wow to fluke, but on the other side of wow) and if you double the length, it gets to 36 ark minutes. Assuming that was only the middle peak and the rest was below noise levels. So either the sun or something of the same size in the sky (and 0.3° if you look only at the wow signal as is), 0.5 to 0.6 is 16% error ( if you say the next number is 0-9 on both, then it's between 27.5% and 1.6% error and another ~0.33% from day not exactly 24 hrs ) so my current hypothesis at the high accuracy end is just as accurate as his probability. And a nice coincidence the width of the signal is 72 sec, and so is the width of the window we are looking from (72 sec from what he said), (i'm getting 1/15 mins from the rotation of earth for 1 minute over 1 arc minute opening, as stated, if 3 minutes apart and are as shown in the diagram, (width/15) if openings rotated by 90° individually )
@@opiesmith9270 if you look up the Wow signal the data we caught from it the signal was only a slice of the actual full transmission of the signal itself, if we had caught the data slightly later we could have had enough data to coherently say the modulation rose in a pattern typical to that of broadcasting out from a relay.
Edit: sorry I understand this didn’t really answer your question, there is no way to tell without the missing data. We caught 72 seconds of wow it’s transmission was indeed way longer.
@@ГеоргиГеоргиев-с3г @opie smith haha wow you know your frequencies dude! I don’t know a lot about frequency but it was understood that wow peaked over those 72 seconds like you said, so that would be your answer as to how we know the length of the transmission?
I've watched this video every night to fall asleep to and each night I think I'll comment tomorrow but always forget so I'm doing it now I think it's great how you mention the actual person who discovered the signal. I've watched space stuff constantly for the past 6 years on TH-cam and seen plenty on the wow signal and not once did anyone say it was found by a member of the public never mind naming the guy. Props to you guys for giving him the credit he deserves
What if the wow signal was an alien signal but it was sent by mistake?
Would it be preferable to see the Wow signal repeat but from a very different part of the sky, and we can link it to a natural phenomena?
what an amazing video into the power of science to deep dive into a question. Super inspired!
Holy cow, not pulling any stops with this one. Very impressive work yet again!
This story is a big lie. They were able to trace the signal to a microwave in the lunch room.
@@viperracing2889In what lunch room? The detectors were outside.
The phrase is "pulling out all of the stops" in reference to pipe organs. What you said means the opposite of what you intended.
Greetings from Greece! Such a nicely presented video about such an important Astronomy subject. Cool Worlds raises the bar for You Tube videos!!! Great job! Thank you for being so comprehensive and informative.
David: * _breathes_ *
Me: 👀🦻 “Fascinating.”
Could it be a case of human influence in some way? Somebody manually sending a signal directly to the observatory on purpose for some reason? Perhaps a cruel practical joke or a scientist trying to get more funding for bigger and better equipment? I hate to be such a naysayer, but without a repeat event it's hard to believe it came from an intelligent source unless that intelligence was here on Earth with their own selfish motivations. Regardless I feel like this was the best video explaining the Wow! Signal as well as the mystery surrounding it. It's also really cool you got to work with Robert. Excellent production as always. The world of science needs people like you to make it interesting and understandable. I love all your work.
Wow!
Wow!
I’ve also wondered if it could have been spoofed, but I think for that to be the case the spoofer would need to at least generally understand how Big Ear worked, build a narrow band transmitter tuned to 1420, aim it at a single horn, and then send the signal in a perfect bell curve. Further, they’d have to be ‘committed to the bit’ by never doing it a second time, nor leaking their prank to anyone.
Likely? No.
More likely than an alien signal? It would seem so.
@@truthsmiles I was thinking the same thing actually. Someone who knows how the big ear works would be the only likely culprit. Not like some kids with a laser pointer could pull it off, not saying that would even work of course but just as an example that is relatable. It would make it easier to get a bigger ear so to speak if you need it to search for a wow signal. The funding process of all these research facilities is a really big motivator for the people running them I would imagine. Desperate people take desperate measures. It's also so strange that only one horn picked it up. Would be hard to get a fake signal into both horns I would imagine.
@@JonnoPlays Let's assume a scientist working at Big Ear who is willing to do whatever it takes to get funding comes up with a scheme to create the Wow! signal... I would think building a small handheld low-power transmitter that operates on 1420 MHz and just sends noise or a sine wave would be well within the scientist's capabilities.
Then, while no one is around, they could walk right up to the horn and, following a bell curve of sorts, turn the signal up and then down over 72 seconds while holding the device inches from the horn.
Completely feasible, IMO.
BUT, does that really achieve the objective? First, as far as I know, no new funding came of it (maybe I'm wrong about that?). And second, to get more funding, wouldn't it make sense to make it more convincing? Like, why not do both horns? And then, why not repeat it in the future? Maybe even clip the signal partway through one of the bell curves to make it seem to abruptly cut off - you know, something to more strongly suggest intelligent life?
Idk, it just seems to me if it was a spoof, it could have been done better?
Also, I'd think we'd know by now... some 90 year old guy would have written a confession to be opened after his death to say he did it to try and save the project. I know everyone isn't like me, but I'd have a hard time living with the knowledge that my 'little white lie' misled the entire world for 50 years.
Hope the dark forest theory is wrong, otherwise sending signals will turn out to be big mistake
We foxed up already. Guess we’ll find out.
Given what we now know about the way science works... Have we eliminated hardware faults? Seeing how cosmic rays can interfere with electronics I want to look into this possibility of fault.
My gut reaction is that there couldn't be a forced bit flip to create the signal for the length of the observation. I still want to bring this up for the comments...
They eliminated every source of false external signals they could.
It always tickles me that there's a telescope called "The Very Large Array". On this basis, I'm disappointed that the Australians didn't call theirs the "Crikey! What a Whopper!" Radio Telescope.
The VLA is a very cool thing to see!
I think that one of the scientists said that he likes to call it "the bloody huge array".
We also have the "Very Large Telescope (VLT)", the "Extremely Large Telescope (ELT)" and the "Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL)". Alas, they decided to do the ELT instead of the OWL.
This entire statistical anaylsis doesnt even have to relate to an artifical origin at all. The signal happened, whether natural or artifical. If only one signal ever came, its unlikely we just happened to detect it. If theres more, its unlikely we havent detected more. Just adds to the intrigue.
Staying curious, sir! Fascinating video. I look at it this way: As I understand it, the primary detractor of this and other interesting signals over the years is that it has only been detected once without repeat. But here’s the thing… Often I make a phone call or receive a phone call to/from a person I will only speak with them once, and with our business concluded, I have no reason to speak with them again. That certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t exist; it certainly doesn’t mean that he/she doesn’t exist. It means I have no reason to repeat the call.
They also don't have to establish first contact over lightyears without a shared language or agreed means of comunication. It's silly to send one signal and expect someone to respond. If you want someone to pick up the phone you don't shine a window into their bedroom one night and then wait. You'd keep flashing it until they send you something back or something at least.
@@solsystem1342 True, although that assumes that the signal was meant for us and we didn’t answer. I would tend to assume the signal had nothing to do with us, but we just happened to observe it. (Or it is wasn’t a signal at all.) Anything is possible.
There being one detection has nothing to do with how many times the source may or may not have sent it. It has to do with the fact that we can't confirm a signal that is only RECEIVED once.
@@stargazer7644 - Yes, I understand that that’s the standard. But my point is that the standard doesn’t really prove or disprove anything. But then neither does the signal itself. It’s evidence, but by no means proof. So, one is left to ponder “what if…?” - but it shouldn’t be discounted simply because it remains an open question without an answer.
@@MoonjumperReviews Of course it would prove something. If the signal is received more than once, it proves a lot of things. If it is received by two different telescopes it rules out pretty much all terrestrial RFI or hardware problems, and proves the target is in space and confirms where it is. That's WHY we need confirmation. If you don't have confirmation you don't really have anything.
Amazing! I was too young to remember the ‘Wow’ signal in real time but have learned about it since. Carl Sagan’s book ‘Contact’ is one of my favs……. I was never great at maths but love everything to do with the universe, planets, and their mysteries and I love checking in to the NASA deep space network and watch the signals being sent to Voyager from Tidbinbilla radio telescope in Canberra, here in Australia or when it’s receiving a signal from Voyager- so special as the expectation is that there’s only a few years left when we may be able to detect Voyager’s signal at all …… just extraordinary ….. 😊😊😊🇦🇺
What if it was some civilization's last desperate cry out for help.
If it was a narrow beam aimed somewhere specific and Earth just happened to pass through it, the only way to see it again would be to send a probe to wherever Earth was on that day in 1977. That point is (very roughly, assuming 45 years ago and the Sun moving at 200 km/sec through the galaxy) 285 billion kilometers away (about 1900 AU or .03 light years). Best get started.
The source of the beam is also moving.
@@lukebalderose334 True. And that's an unknowable factor.
That's what exactly I was thinking.....everything is moving in the expanding universe.......
This video is so great the region of space was so big that it requires a lot of time of observation to fully disproved it.
Gotta say, you have a phenomenal voice and impeccable diction.
I love listening to you speak. ;)
Same :)
It’s amazing what a good mic can do!
@@CoolWorldsLab Good answer! ;)
Except for the word "skepticism"
and "statistical"
Thank you for that thought-provoking and highly informative video. The standard of your Cool Worlds videos is simply outstanding! I have no scientific training but hugely enjoy your presentations, so thank you once again for all the effort you put into them.
One of the best youtube videos I've ever seen. Thank you so much for putting this together
I've never commented. I dont know why, but all I got to say is you are my favorite educational youtuber. Maybe because you are credible? You cite your sources and you're an astronomical physicist? Or is it your enthralling voice combined with your ability to coherently articulate the insanity of the cosmos? Idk but mad love ❤️
The edit was a "an" lol
Remember that the Arecibo message was only sent once and was more of a tech demonstration than a real shot at sending a message. IF we assume that the WOW signal is the product of an alien intellgence, it might be a reasonable assumption that it too was some sort of test or otherwise unintentional random signal that we were just lucky to receive. But then again that could imply that we should see similar random signals fairly regularly.
Off - topic ...
As a (very) amateur astronomer, I was deeply saddened at what happened to Arecibo ...
Personally, despite its limitations, I think rebuilding it is key, especially as was the integral part of the global radio astronomical network that created a synthetic radio telescope on an incredible scale ...
I can imagine that an Arecibo 2.0, plus updates to the VLA, would only strengthen that ...
Even if governments are reluctant, I am - perhaps too hopeful - that a global effort in crowdfunding, especially given astronomy is a global effort, may just work ...
It’s fake, they made up the signal, that paper isn’t real.
Best briefing on this subject I've ever heard, Thanks
Love the mysterious topics like the Wow signal. This'll be good 👍🏻
there is no any mistery in WOW, pure yellow story
@@mphet1000 There's a mystery in your spelling though 🤔
@@KingBritish don't be a troll, we are all on the same side here, love of science.
@@john9982 That's not being a troll. His comment was unnecessary
@@KingBritish lingvo teacher detected on youtube
For a interstellar signal of the strength to reach us, it will have to be pointed towards us. And, due to how earth rotates and revolves, and how even stars move, it is possible that we were aligned with that planet for just few minutes which got luckily picked up by the Big Ear. And, next time we align will be many many years later.
Alternatively, if it is a purposeful signal some aliens sent specifically in our direction, then they wouldn't know we are intelligent beings. They may have detected bio-signature from far away and they may have a long list of planets that has life on them. But they may not be able to detect that there is intelligent life here. So, they may be beaming signals purposefully for few hours at each of the planets one by one, and we only picked up the starting of one such attempt. They simply moved on to their next planet on the list.
I love the sound of those old IBM printers. Takes me back to my childhood over at my dad’s work.
That one russian spy satellite operator 45 years ago who pushed the “send” button buy accident for a second “blyat.. i hope no one moticed”
17:00 What if we're thinking in too small time scales?
What if it is a patterned repeating signal, but on much larger scales, with each individual transmission just comprising one "blip" of the overall pattern. Perhaps it appears to be a random distribution until you get the full image, at which point it may have been transmitting at the interval for describing the structure of an oxygen atom with all its electron clouds, but with each blip being the WoW signal at the hydrogen line to confirm its artificial.
Or it might even be transmitting at the specific frequencies for each atom it's trying to represent.
Perhaps it blips at the hydrogen frequency, then blips at the following elements.
could be just a unmistakable signal , send by a alien station that has the sole purpose of sending the same signal towards a massive list of planets that could harbor life.
we do not know what timescale they live by, or how big the list is.
its purpose could be to only signal a, hey we are intelligent life, for the sole reason they had not found any themselves, and or after they found a signal of the same sort they simply stopped with the project.
whatever it is , it is mind boggling that this signal has been put off as, anything other than alien life.
It was never heard again.
Thank you very much for this very special video, dear Prof. Kipping. It's great and impressive how you explain this and remember this dedicated scientist. I will not forget that and hope that the hopes you expressed come true.
Thank you, the best explanation of the 'WOW' signal I have yet heard. Keep up your good work.
This story is a big lie. They were able to trace the signal to a microwave in the lunch room.
@@viperracing2889 I'm getting so much second-hand embarassment watching you so confidently mix up two different stories in the replies of nearly every comment on this video. If I was you I'd just delete my entire youtube account.
The fact that we don't have multiple dishes around the world doing this every day absolutely boggles my mind...
You can pay for them if you want.
A wise squid once said, I am all out of money
It's because is is an extreme needle in a haystack problem. Even if we had a million dishes around the world looking constantly, we'd be surveying an infinitesimally small part of the possible search space. Each antenna can only view an extremely small piece of sky, and can only listen to a tiny fraction of the radio spectrum in that small piece of sky. Even if we knew for sure someone out there is sending a signal, the odds are we'd never find it. Are you willing to spend huge sums of money on something like that? Or would you rather invest it in something more likely to give you a return on your investment?
Another approach: If the signal is periodic indeed, but the transmission is operated manually, not automatically, one could make the rough assumption that it would repeat at the same rate of the day-night-cycle of the earth-like planets within the observed region. Meaning: Observe all the earth-like planets within that region, estimate the duration between days, apply the rate to your emulated model, see what comes out. One could even use a single day as the smallest time unit and look for rates that correspond to every second day, or third day, or astronomical year.
It's not a conclusive approach at all, but might be worth trying.
which earth like planets
Love your videos Mr. KIPPING. I'm just a normal gen-x'er non scientific dude. Most of the time I don't understand half of the science stuff u say, but i am learning. The computers in your opening are older than most people who watch your channel....lol. I wish I had professor's back in my day like you.
@John This man is a genius, i too don't understand half of what he says but he sure is just so good at what he does that i can't stop watching...I also learn more with him every time I watch his videos...There is lots of us that would love to have him as our professor... Blessings to you all from Puerto Rico with lots of love
this channel is something else🔥🔥
Dr. Kipping: Just wanted to say, thank you personally for this video. You of all people I'd expect to call the Wow! signal dead. Your unfailing inquiry into the truth is amazing. I have my personal beliefs, and have shared them on social media, but you were the inspiration and I thank you for that. Stay curious. Stay awesome.
I love your videos. They're very well produced, informative & fun to watch :)
The Event Horizon channel has excellent content on this topic. He talks about why the signal may have no need to repeat if we had captured the entire burst.
Another thing to note is every signal Earth has sent into space never repeated, and we have no intention of ever doing so.
do aliens have government funding for projects that gets cut...???
The significance of the fact that the signal didn't repeat has nothing to do with how many times the source did or did not send it. It has to do with the fact that a signal that is only RECEIVED once cannot be confirmed.