Update: The WOW! Signal Solved.

When you do a blog (or anything, really) focused on history, you have to do corrections once in a while. On Thursday, August 15, I ran this article, profiling the thought-provoking phenonemon of the “WOW! Signal,” a radio transmission from space that was intercepted by the Big Ear, a radio observatory in Ohio, on August 15, 1977. You can read that article to see why I found it so fascinating.

Near the end of the article I said:

“Every couple of years I revisit the subject of the WOW! Signal and check to see if there’s any new serious scholarship on it, or if it’s been solved or explained in a convincing way. To date, it has not been.”

I was wrong about that. My husband—a reader of this blog—pointed out something I completely missed, that researchers from the Center of Planetary Science announced in June 2017 that they believe they have solved the WOW! Signal mystery, and it was not a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence. According to a report from Phys.org:

“The explanation started to come into focus last year when a team at the CPS suggested that the signal might have come from a hydrogen cloud accompanying a comet—additionally, the movement of the comet would explain why the signal was not seen again. The team noted that two comets had been in the same part of the sky that the Big Ear was monitoring on the fateful day. Those comets, P/2008 Y2(Gibbs) and 266/P Christensen had not yet been discovered. The team then got a chance to test their idea as the two comets appeared once again in the night sky from November 2016 through February of 2017.

The team reports that radio signals from 266/P Christensen matched those from the Wow! signal [in 1977]. To verify their results, they tested readings from three other comets, as well, and found similar results. The researchers acknowledge that they cannot say with certainty that the Wow! signal was generated by 266/P Christensen, but they can say with relative assurance that it was generated by a comet.”

That sounds like a pretty convincing explanation, and one that fits all the facts we know. It’s a pretty interesting bit of scientific detective work. I’m somewhat embarrassed that I missed this the last time I searched for an update on the phenomenon, but there it is in any event. There remains, to my understanding—which, as this article demonstrates, is imperfect—no real convincing evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. One would like to believe that there is, but the facts are what they are. As the novel and film Contact, which I referenced in the previous article, explore, the question of whether we are alone in the universe has a curious intersection with matters of faith, both in science and in God. Those remain the larger questions that incidents like the WOW! Signal should make us think about.

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