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The Wow signal - listen up!
Dec 13, 2004 18: 34 EST
Previously published Dec 5, 2004 20: 28 EST
On the night of August 15, 1977, as on every other night, at the Ohio State University Observatory, Big Ear was searching the skies for an alien signal, its observations recorded on a printout sheet.
An exceptional string of characters and numbers struck Jerry Ehman, a professor at Franklin University in Columbus, when he was going over the printout that night: 6EQUJ5. He circled the code and added a single comment in the margin: "Wow!"
Not only was it extremely strong, but it also almost certainly came from outside the Earth. Numerous attempts to relocate the "Wow!" signal have been made in the past twenty five years, to no avail. But it happened once.
The next one could be yours...
Today, you can re-live that sensation. If you join SETI@home, you'll be part of SERENDIP, a world network of computers, attached to the world's largest radiotelescope, the giant Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico.
You just download the file, and that's it...Until...
There you'll be, working at your desk, while SETI@home silently crunches data on the computer screen beside you. Suddenly, from the corner of your eye you'll notice some unusual graphics on the screen. You look up, and there it is! An unmistakable signal from an alien civilization, clearly visible on your computer screen. Right there on your home computer you have discovered ET! Your place in history is assured...
If you are very, very lucky.
NASA on/off
SETI is short for Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence. It began in 1959, with a call in a scientific paper by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison and the first modern radiotelescope search by Frank Drake the next year. But money was lacking and few scientists were involved. At last, NASA was going to join in 1981, building the world's largest radio, but a senator killed the budget.
Suitcase SETI
This is when Carl Sagan's Planetary Society came to rescue. Just created, the society met with the NASA SETI scientists. "It was held in a room with a long, six-sided table that reminded me of a coffin, which fitted our mood perfectly. The one bright note was provided by a young Harvard professor, Paul Horowitz, who had been working with the NASA scientists. He described his plan to build a SETI system so small that it would be portable, able to be carried to existing radiotelescopes. He called it Suitcase SETI," recalls Thomas R. McDonough, one of the founders of the society.
ET pays for his own search
Within a year, The Planetary Society's first SETI project was scanning the heavens. The suitcase was great but a bigger program was needed and that same year, in 1982, Steven Spielberg - following his release of ET - funded Carl Sagan the $100,000 needed to build Project META (Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay) - a receiver, today covering a quarter of a billion channels.
Most SETI has been conducted in the northern hemisphere. But the southern half of the universe is rich with potential sites for other civilizations - META II, is the first permanent SETI observatory on the southern half of earth, near Buenos Aires.
All together now - Anybody out there?
Putting out the ear was a first step. But then came another obstacle - how to process the large amounts of data?
In 1996, David Gedye and Craig Kasnoff had the idea of using the Internet as a supercomputer to process the analyzing the huge amounts of data that SETI produces. At the end of their rope with funds, they approached the Planetary Society - and SERENDIP -- the Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations - was born. It is now attached to the world's largest radiotelescope, the giant Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico, connected with SETI@home that now allows computer users everywhere to participate in SETI.
"We had hoped that we could get 100,000 people to participate. We got two million!" writes Thomas R. McDonough. There are so many computers now that we can look for subtle signal types that no one has had the computing power to search for previously.
If you want to join the hunt, go to the Society's website.
A new addition to SETI, is a light/laser based search. Light-based SETI projects at Harvard and Berkeley, have optical telescopes search for flashes of light or for light whose energy is concentrated into an unnaturally pure color, either of which could be distinguished from the steady, multicolored natural light of a star.
Image of "your" Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico, the original Wow signal and "your" SETI Wow signal simulation, courtesy of NASA, Planetary Society and the Big Ear Observatory.
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