Talk:Wow! signal

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Copyvio

the latest addition.. posss copywright violation . Article originally from space.com source on net -max rspct 13:35, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the signal! Well spotted and Just In Time! Reverted to the anterior edition. Cheers -- Svest 01:01, 18 December 2005 (UTC) ^{Wiki me up}[reply]

Who decided Jerry is an "astrophysicist"? He's actually a stats professor.

72 seconds

Why is 72 seconds of any paricular concern? That needs to be explained. --Exodio 22:52, 22 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That's explained by the Space.com article linked as Reference 3. The Big Ear radio telescope was fixed to the Earth; its tracking beams scanned the sky at the speed of Earth's rotation. At that speed, a single signal would take 72 seconds to traverse the telescope's beam (the patch of sky it was scanning) from one end to the other, and would show a gradual peaking as the signal reached the center, then a gradual decrease as it passed out of the beam. Think of a lighthouse beam sweeping across your field of vision. In short, since the Wow! signal lasted 72 seconds, it was most likely a continuously-transmitting signal from a distance that the telescope swept across, and not a nearby sudden burst signal (which was unlike to last precisely 72 seconds and peaking halfway through) like a terrestrial satellite signal or reflection. ANTPogo 02:40, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Tau Sagittarii...?

Why is Tau Sagittarii implied as the possible source of the Wow! signal? Its location in the sky is well outside the margin of error for its location. Furthermore, it is not "the closest visible star in the night sky to the origin of the 1977 wow signal"; there is a magnitude 5.5 star (HD 183275) only a few arcminutes from the source, and at least a dozen other stars brighter than sixth magnitude (limit of human vision) are closer than Tau Sagittarii, though admittedly Tau Sagittarii is much brighter than any of these, by about two magnitudes. Furthermore, this section of the article ("Location in the night sky") seems to imply that the source must come from a bright star, but this need not be the case. I suggest a revision of this section. --Shawn81 00:24, 27 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Decoding?

I presume people have tried to see if they can make any sense of the 'signal'? This isn't mentioned. On this note, I guess none if it appears to be repeated since if it had, this would be extremely interesting and would have been mentioned (I mean within the one signal). Nil Einne 16:01, 1 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Reading a bit more, it doesn't look like the signal appears to have contained much (at least what we received) and the quality of our detection at the time was so poor that we probably wouldn't even be able to understand anything that is there so I guess decoding it irrelevant Nil Einne 16:10, 1 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

We can't decode it because they read the intensity of the signal, not any message from it. So, basically, we possibly could have had we recorded it, but we simply recorded intensity, not its content. Titanium Dragon 08:05, 14 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

So we blew it pretty much? ~~

Searches for recurrence

A minor point, but the first sentence of the searches for recurrence section states that the detection was made in the first of two beams. However this contradicts the two cited possible locations (note Right Ascension is different by three minutes) and reference [1], which state that they don't know which of the two detection beams actually received the signal. However, it is true that in any case, a continuous signal should have been found in both beams, but wasn't. I'm not sure if I'm right enough to make this change, though. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by FayssalF (talk • contribs) 20:08, 1 February 2007 (UTC).[reply]

Paranormal?

What is paranormal about the WOW signal? I suggest that we remove the paranormal wikiproject tag, unless someone can give reasons why it is paranormal. Bubba73 (talk), 03:37, 19 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]