"At the time, astronomer Jerry Ehman spotted the highly unusual outburst in printed out records, annotating the major radio band fluctuation with the word "Wow!" in red pen, thereby giving it a memorable nickname: the "Wow! Signal." The incident has remained a mystery for decades, never spotted again in over 48 years, leaving plenty of questions in its wake. Where did it come from, and why did it only last for 72 seconds?"
"Now, Harvard astronomer and alien hunter Avi Loeb has a wild new theory about the signal. In a new blog post, he suggested that interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, which is currently cruising through our solar system, could've sent off the signal back in 1977 - when it was still 600 times the distance between the Earth and Sun away from us. Examining the sky coordinates of the object and the Wow! Signal, Loeb concluded that the "chance of two random directions in the sky being aligned to that level is about 0.6 percent.""
"Ever since it was first observed in July, 3I/ATLAS - only the third interstellar object ever spotted - has fascinated scientists. Loeb has previously pointed to the object's unusual chemical makeup, its peculiar path taking it close to the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and its enormous suspected size to suggest that it could be a piece of technology sent to us by an alien race."
A narrowband radio burst detected by the Big Ear radio telescope in 1977 lasted 72 seconds and was annotated "Wow!", remaining unexplained for decades and never reappearing. A hypothesis links the event to interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, which would have been about 600 astronomical units away in 1977 and aligns with the Wow! Signal direction to a calculated 0.6 percent chance. The hypothesis estimates a required transmitter power of roughly 0.5 to 2 gigawatts. 3I/ATLAS is the third known interstellar object, noted for unusual chemical signatures, an odd trajectory, and an unusually large suspected size.
Read at Futurism
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