The 72-Second Signal That Was Never Meant to Hit Earth (But Earth Got in the Way)

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The Wow! Signal has lingered as one of astronomy’s greatest puzzles. Detected in 1977 by the Big Ear Radio Telescope in Ohio, it was a powerful, narrowband signal centered on the hydrogen line at 1420 MHz: the frequency many scientists thought an intelligent beacon might use. For 72 seconds it rose, peaked, and faded in a pattern exactly as a real celestial source would when drifting through the telescope’s beam. Then it was gone. Dozens of follow-up searches, across different telescopes and decades, never picked it up again.

Over the years, skeptics and believers have debated endlessly. Could it have been a passing satellite? A glitch? Or perhaps a stray Earth transmission bouncing off space debris? Careful reviews ruled those out. The frequency, the profile, and the silence before and after all suggested it wasn’t local interference. Jerry Ehman, the astronomer who first circled “6EQUJ5” on the printout, grew more cautious with time, admitting the odds of a repeat detection seemed slim. Yet the mystery remained intact, feeding imaginations for nearly half a century.

Now, a fresh look reframes the debate. A study released on the 48th anniversary of the detection, known as Arecibo Wow! II, has sifted through decades of SETI archives with modern tools. Researchers traced potential sky positions, cross-referenced old surveys, and weighed natural astrophysical explanations such as flaring hydrogen clouds. The verdict was not a final answer, but a sharpened set of possibilities that may bring us closer to knowing what Big Ear really heard.

Source(s):
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10657
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18382
https://arxiv.org/html/2507.14916v1
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12213
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21967
https://minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K2...

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