The Signal That Wrote Its Own Exclamation
For seventy two seconds in 1977 a telescope heard something that has never come back. An astronomer's one word reaction gave it a name.
On the night of 15 August 1977, the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University recorded a narrow burst of radio energy close to the frequency of hydrogen. When the astronomer Jerry Ehman reviewed the printout days later, he circled the strongest reading and wrote the word Wow beside it. The signal lasted about seventy two seconds, which is as long as the fixed design of the telescope allowed any source to remain in view.
Despite repeated searches, nobody has detected it again. Its rise and fall in strength matched what a distant fixed source would produce as the Earth turned, but a signal that does not repeat cannot be tested, and so it can be neither confirmed as a message nor dismissed as an accident.
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