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On August 15, 1977, the Big Ear radio telescope on the campus of Ohio State University recorded a 72-second narrowband signal onto a paper tape. Several days later, Jerry Ehman, an astronomer at the university, studied the tape and found the signal so unusual that he scrawled the word Wow! next to the data points. Since that time, the signal has been discussed at great length in the astronomy community, but nobody has been able to explain its origin. The researchers focused their efforts on that star system using two telescopes, the Green Bank Telescope and the Allen Telescope Array....

The Wow! signal represented as "6EQUJ5". Credit: Big Ear Radio Observatory and North American AstroPhysical Observatory (NAAPO) ====================================================================== Amateur astronomer and YouTuber Alberto Caballero, one of the founders of The Exoplanets Channel, has found a small amount of evidence for a source of the notorious Wow! signal. In his paper uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, Caballero describes searching the Gaia database for possible sun-like stars that might host an exoplanet capable of supporting intelligent life. Back in 1977, astronomers working with the Big Ear Radio Telescope—at the time, situated in Delaware, Ohio—recorded a unique signal from somewhere in space....

In 1977, radio astronomer Jerry Ehman was looking through observation data from the Big Ear Radio Telescope....searching for evidence that alien civilizations might be trying to communicate using radio waves... ... The search generated...nothing but the background radio transmissions of the Universe. But then he saw a data signal so interesting and unique that he circled it and wrote “WOW” in a red pen... Ehman circled the characters “6EQUJ5”, distinguishing them from all the other 1s and 2s on the field of data. What does this code mean? ... Why does it start with a 6 and then end with...