A Signal From Deep Space Lasted Exactly 72 Seconds — Nobody Has Heard It Again

A Signal From Deep Space Lasted Exactly 72 Seconds — Nobody Has Heard It Again On August 15, 1977, a volunteer astronomer at Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope circled a single row of characters on a computer printout and wrote one word in the margin: Wow. It was a radio signal from deep space, exactly 72 seconds long, sitting right on the frequency scientists said an alien civilization would use. It never came back. The Wow! signal remains the most famous unexplained signal in the history of the search for extraterrestrial life. Detected by Jerry Ehman on a 72-second drift scan from the constellation Sagittarius, it reached roughly thirty times the background noise on the hydrogen line at 1420 MHz, with a rise-and-fall curve matching a fixed point in deep space. Decades of follow-up searches with more sensitive telescopes found nothing. Theories have ranged from comets to space debris to interstellar scintillation. In 2024, the Arecibo Wow! project re-analyzed the archival data and proposed a natural maser-like flare: a cold hydrogen cloud briefly ignited by a magnetar or soft gamma repeater, with the signal now estimated at over 250 Janskys — but even the researchers admit the case is not closed. #WowSignal #SETI #SpaceMystery #UnsolvedMystery #DeepSpace #Aliens #Astronomy #SalaarStories