DISCLAIMER

The following is the opinion of the writer/s and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, gender, sexual orientation or individual. The views of the writer/s are his own, and do not in any way reflect the views of the site they are posted on, other sites affiliated with this site, the staff involved with the site, or any other members of this site. Furthermore, they do not necessarily reflect the views of the the people who live in the author’s neighbourhood, city, province, country, continent, hemisphere, planet, star system, galaxy, or universe of orign. Please also note that the fact the piece is written in English is in no way meant to malign other languages or linguistic entities, nor to malign those who are illiterate or visually impaired and thus are unable to read the piece. Furthermore, the individual letters, words, and punctuation marks involved had no option but to be placed into the story, and should not be held accountable for the writers’ statement. Any spelling or grammatical errors are not the responsibility of the the schools the author/s attended, the teachers the author/s was taught by, the regional governments who did or did not fund the authors’ educational system, or anyone else involved in the authors’ education. In point of fact, the author/s also do not take any responsibility for his actions and opinions and does not hold his parents, siblings, other relations, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, people in any proximity, or that strange guy he talked to on the bus three weeks ago responsible for anything in the following work, or for anything else the author may or may not have done. The author/s freely admits that his views may not be the same as those of his religious group, gender, species, ethnic group, or other club. The author/s has written the posts based on his/her point of view at a particular point of time and is only a snapshot of his/her mind at the time he / she typed the words through the keyboard or mouse or any other physical and mental gestures possible, and subsequently his/her views may have changed but they did not have sufficient time to make those changes in the posts. The authors do not take any responsibility for any losses incurred, physical and property damage and any other catastrophe caused to the readers as a result of reading the blog posts. The readers have to read the blog posts at their own peril.No animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, viri, spores, seeds or any other living things were harmed during the making of this disclaimer or blog. Further, no environmental damage was caused to any ecosphere, existing or nonexisting. All electrons used in the production were strictly volunteers, and all paper was made of trees that died of natural causes.

This website may inadvertently link to content that is obscene, prurient, useless, hate-filled, poisonous, pornographic, frivolous, empty, rotten, bad, disgusting, hostile, repulsive, virulent, infectious…This website in no way condones, endorses or takes responsibility for such content. The accuracy, completeness, veracity, honesty, exactitude, factuality and politeness of comments are not guaranteed.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Mysteries of WOW

In August 1977, a sky survey conducted with Ohio State University's "Big Ear" radio telescope found what has become known as the 'Wow' signal. Registering an enormous signal strength (60 Janskys in a 10 KHz channel, which is more than 50 thousand times more incoming energy than the minimum signal that would register as a hit for today's Project Phoenix.). The shape of the signal had the characteristic rise and fall expected for its short 72 second lifetime. But a hitch remains: the signal has not been retrieved from other sky surveys, making it more anomaly than confirmable cosmic source. This odd, one-beam behavior could be caused by an alien transmission that simply went off the air during the 3 minutes between beams.

If the putative aliens permanently shut down their transmitter, then there's no chance of ever hearing the Wow signal again. Like a single sighting of the Loch Ness monster, we would never be able to prove what it was. But if the signal is periodic - if, for example, the aliens are using a rotating radio beacon that sweeps the star-studded strata of the Milky Way once every five minutes or every five hours - then we could hope to find it by just looking again.

For the moment, despite the use of the Harvard META SETI system, the Very Large Array (VLA) and the new 26-meter radio telescope in Hobart, Tasmania, Wow has not been detected again.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Configuration After installing, you might want to change these default settings: