Paris said little research has been done on the topic. In the third phase, set for 2018, Paris plans to explore the mechanisms of the emissions -why comets should generate radio waves at that particular wavelength. "The first phase was the hypothesis, which led to the second phase: Do comets emit 1,420 ? It appears yes, they do," Paris told Live Science. Paris first floated the idea in early 2016, and proposed a program of using radio telescopes to listen for the emission of such radio waves. According to the study, Comet 266P/Christensen was in about the right position on the right day in 1977. In his paper, Paris wrote that comets will, under certain conditions, emit radio waves from the gases that surround them as they zoom closer to the sun. Ehman, now retired, told Live Science that, beyond a certain distance, it's hard to tell how far away a radio signal is coming from. Without a repeat signal, it was impossible to tell what it was even getting a precise location wasn't easy because the signal was short-lived. But no one expected to see anything like the Wow! signal, and the Big Ear telescope heard nothing like it again. Ehman marked "Wow!" in red pen on a printout that shows the numbers representing the signal.īack in 1977, the now-dismantled Big Ear telescope was looking for alien signals, in an early iteration of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. The signal did not repeat, and subsequent attempts to find it proved fruitless. "We do not believe the two-comets theory can explain the Wow! signal," Jerry Ehman, the astronomer who discovered the Wow! signal in 1977, told Live Science. Originally, Paris' hypothesis was that a second comet might also be the culprit, one called P/2008 Y Gibbs.) Explanations for the Wow! signal have ranged from intermittent natural phenomena, to secret spy satellites, to, yes, aliens. (The comet was discovered more recently, in 2006. Petersburg College in Florida, recently published a paper in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences saying the mysterious " Wow! signal," a truly bizarre radio signal detected almost 40 years ago, seems to match up with the location of a comet called 266P/Christensen that hadn't been cataloged at the time. But his colleagues said they're still skeptical of the explanation, noting that comets don't emit radio waves in the right way.Īntonio Paris, an astronomer at St. An astronomer thinks he's pinpointed the source of a mysterious radio signal from space: a passing comet that nobody knew about.
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