New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years | Hacker News Reader

New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years

theguardian.com

115 pointsohjeez73 comments

Forgive me if this is a daft question, but, how much effort has gone into analysing the contents of this signal?

It appears we have 72 seconds of data to work with, or is it just completely random data with no pattern at all?

If we did receive an intelligent signal from an extraterrestrial source, what form do we think or hope it would take? Perhaps something along the lines of counting out the first 100 prime numbers?

-Edit- so to answer my own question, there is no actual recording of the signal, we only have the intensity of the signal over a period of 72 seconds, represented by 6 characters, each covering a period of 12 seconds.

6EQUJ5

Why is that? We just didn't record it?

1977

1977. The intensity data was the recording according to the standard of the times.

Having read about historical radio astronomy and practiced signals analysis, I think they were a little more sophisticated than that. The recording in this format was made for easy perusal by a human, say, the next morning. I think that was the case with this signal. No doubt they wanted to revisit that spot in the sky looking at intensity, frequency shifting (Doppler), bandwidth, modulation, etc. But they never saw it again.

Historical point of interest: the Big Ear telescope that recorded this was bulldozed to make way for a golf course.

There's still a "memorial" web site:

http://www.bigear.org/about.htm

The Big Ear telescope "was larger than three football fields in size and equivalent in sensitivity to a circular dish 52.5 meters (175 feet) in diameter. The telescope consisted of a flat tiltable reflector measuring 340 feet long by 100 feet high (less when tilted), a fixed standing paraboloidal (curved) reflector which measured 360 feet long by 70 feet high, an aluminum-covered ground plane measuring 360 feet wide by 500 feet long, and two feed horns mounted on a movable assembly."

In 1977 I suspect recording equipment was too expensive for radio telescope work when an alphanumeric graph can suffice.

This is still a problem. I attended a talk a few weeks ago by a member of staff on the Square Kilometer Array Science Data Processor project, and they were talking about data volumes on the order of an exabyte... per day.

Obviously, an awful lot of pre-processing has to be done to get this down to a manageable data volume for analysis (100s of TBs), but if something gets lost in processing in the early stages, it's gone forever. Even managing and archiving the processed datasets will be a challenge.

Oh, and the second stage of the project was going to add 100x to those data volume numbers.

Some day, 30 years from now, people will look back on the term "big data" and laugh at how naive we were.

> If we did receive an intelligent signal from an extraterrestrial source, what form do we think or hope it would take?

For unintentional signals, I think it would take the same form of the early radio broadcasts from here on earth. These are likely some of the weakest signals but they have also traveled further than any other at this point.

These would probably be fairly difficult to detect. The vast majority of the radio messages we have leaked into space over the last 100 years or so weren't focused. By the time they reached a neighbouring star they might be hard to distinguish from background noise. Also let's say someone did manage to detect these signals and they were 80ly's away. They might not have detected them until say 2000, and if they immediately send back a message, we would not receive this until 2080.

I think our best hope is that an Alien civilisation has begun the search for extrasolar planets, like we have. They will be able to analyse the composition of our atmosphere using spectroscopy.

With this information they would either decide that life either exists or is very likely to exist here, and so would begin transmitting a constant and unmissable signal to us in the hope that we would eventually detect it. Providing we manage to monitor the right frequency and look at the right point in the sky..... as life has existed here on earth for Billions of years, perhaps this signal is already been sent to us and we just need to find it....

It's a long shot but perhaps it's the best one we have.

> Comet 266P/Christensen will pass the Chi Sagittarii star group again on 25 January 2017, while 335P/Gibbs will make its passage on 7 January 2018. Paris plans to observe these events to look for a recurrence of the mystery signal. But time is not on his side for using an existing radio telescope – they are all booked out.

Can someone explain why he needs to observe them when they're passing in front of those particular stars?

I think the point is to reproduce as much of the original conditions as possible and check for a similar signature. The paper itself, does not explain the need for exact conditions: http://planetary-science.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Pari...

Wouldn't it be more important to have the comet similarly distant to the Sun?

From the comments on the Guardian site, user bllckchps estimates the needed amount of stuff in the comet to produce the signal:

"Of course, most of the mass is in the nucleus, and will be in molecular form, unobservable at 1.4GHz. Let's be generous, and allow the comet to be made purely of water ice (H20) which will dissociate into a neutral hydrogen (H) and a hydroxyl (OH) as it goes into the halo, meaning that ~1/18 of the mass can be H.

We're already about a factor of 20 too low to explain the Wow signal, and now here's another factor of ~20. What fraction of the total mass is in the halo? Generously, maybe ~1%? So it's about a factor of 40000 too weak to be a plausible model."

The same user, regarding Antonio Paris, the person who collects the money:

"The web page for his Center for Planetary Science is pretty much just a collection of stuff taken verbatim from wikipedia. And his twitter feed is mostly a collection of uncredited images taken from whoever/wherever, interspersed with exhortations to send him cash for this ridiculous project.

If you follow up the various programmes he has been "involved" in (candidate astronaut etc) you will see that they are distinctly less impressive than they might at first seem to the naive. "

Fascinatingly, according to Antonio Paris' LinkedIn profile, he got a Master degree in 2012 and immediately started to refer to himself as "Professor Paris" in the "Area 51" documentary directed by... himself!

His "astronaut candidate" program:

http://projectpossum.org/possum-astronaut-program/training-p...

Wow, indeed.

Kickstarter once again fails to find intelligent life on Earth.

Apparently there was a "Habitable Planets Field Trip" in 2015.

Sorry to have missed that.

Sorry to formulate it like this, but his LinkedIn profile picture looks like one of a real douchebag.

Some current evidence suggests that "because this is a scam."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/across-the-universe/2016...

Other commenters have pointed out other inconsistencies in the story.

From the comments:

"> But time is not on his side for using an existing radio telescope – they are all booked out.

That is not true. There are several major facilities for which observations in January 2017 can still be applied for, and there is not a single one for which you can even yet apply for observations in January 2018. If his idea was good enough, he could submit it to the normal telescope time allocation committees. It looks like he himself knows it's not. And there is not even any reason to wait for the comets to be in a particular part of the sky. Just observe them, or any other comet, at any time, to see if they emit at that frequency."

August the 15th, 1977, signal received. Next day, Elvis dies.

That's just too good of a nutcase story not to be in circulation.

s/dies/called back to his planet/

...was that a Men in Black reference?

This looks like a con job using pseudo-science to get money from well-intentioned individuals.

There do appear to be a number of rather alarming discoveries by people in the Guardian comments section pointing in that direction, yeah.

I read this as 'cron job'.

Strange, likewise.

It's amazing how manual this process still was in the late 70s. Imagine spending hours and hours pouring over tables of numbers. At the same time, it's amazing how hard it still is for computers to say "that's interesting". Sometimes it takes human to go "wow"

That's because "interestingness" takes a _lot_ of context.

Humans interpret the low dimensional natural world into much higher dimensional space by turning things into models (cars, cats, science, etc), and often "wow" comes from a combination of many of those high level interpretations.

Some radio amateur could perhaps help. 40 years is a long time and equipment is now amazingly cheap.

So the amount requested is not all that much money for a radio telescope. A world-class ham radio tower (200 feet or so with appropriate beams) will run about $10,000 per each. So the cost requested here is not that out of line.

So if being a byproduct of comets is ruled out, and we take it for granted that the signal is of extra-terrestrial origin (which apparently has been pretty much accepted), then we don't have an explanation for the origin under our current understanding of the cosmos? Is this a correct understanding? How exciting.

Did they not find the source of the signal last year?

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/10/rogue-mic...

Nah, they knew that those signals were local in origin and the Wow signal wasn't because the perytons showed up no matter which direction they looked in whilst the Wow signal was only received on one of the two antenna at the site.

Seems unlikely. If undiscovered comets were this prone to putting off such strong signals, there should be a lot more unexplained "wow!" notations in notebooks from them.

I do not think it matters how unlikely it is. As long as it is possible and there is no surefire culprit the theory needs to be tested, if only to rule it out.

"Probable" and "unlikely" are antonyms. It can't be unlikely and probable.

edit: The level of likeliness should affect the amount of effort put into testing the hypothesis. I'd like an explanation from them on why they think the Wow! signal is so rare if a comet is the explanation - NASA says there might be as many as a hundred billion comets in the solar system, so "where's the rest of their signals" is a legit criticism.

Thanks, fixed.

I think it's important to remember how empty space actually is, when taking this view point. For instance, an object randomly shot through the asteroid belt has near zero chance of actually hitting anything, and that's a relatively dense space. The Oort cloud, which is where a large number of the theoretically unknown comets live, is only about 5 Earth masses.

The bottom line is, pointing a telescope to a random spot in the sky is very, very likely to find nothing. Even with a billion comets and a billion asteroids and a billion stars.

Forgive the naive question, but why is space so empty.

I mean I understand infinite but I'm just really interested in why the universe is the way that it is.

What is the best theory for this? Has anyone proposed a why?

Space was less empty when it was younger, so I suppose you could say that the answer to your question is "because it's over 13 billion years old."

But really, "why" questions like this come with too many hidden assumptions to be helpful. You need to clarify why you expect it to not be empty. The way I see it, you could just as easily ask why is space so full of stuff as it is.

Because the universe is expanding. Space itself expands the further away you are from a reference point. That means, everything is moving away from us (on a grand scale), and the greater the distance to the reference point, the bigger is the rate things in the universe are moving away from us. I think the rate is about 70 km/(Mpcs) - wich is an incredibly small number, scaled down to a meter it is ~10^-23 m / (ms). And as space expands over time, the density of matter in space get lower and lower.

ELI5 If space is just empty nothing vacuum - how does it expand?

Space isn't an empty vacuum, but that's tangential. The expansion in this context is metric explanation, which just means things are getting further and further apart between two points due to space "expanding" between non-gravitationally bound objects. The explanation for "why" is sort of "we don't know". AFAIK, the leading theory is a combination of momentum / inertia from the big bang and acceleration from dark energy. Which we also don't know a lot about.

Possible answers:

#1) Why wouldn't it be?

#2) as far as we know, it is a lot less empty than it seems to be. We're missing about 85% of the mass in the universe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter), and about 95% of its mass-energy.

So, the best theory we have is, in some sense, awfully inaccurate, at least until we invent some way to see the missing stuff.

Tangentially related: why is the night sky black? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox)

The level of likeliness/probability for a given explanation depends crucially upon the level of likeliness/probability for all other explanations. This is the fatal flaw of research using p-values to assess evidence for a given theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem

Depends. It might require the telescope to be pointed at just the right angle at just the right time.

"How a team of astronomers embezzled crowd funders into buying them a new telescope by making them believe they will look for a 'Wow' signal explanation"

That's so nastily uncharitable.

I understand the fun in painting what people are doing in the blackest possible colors. It's a parlor game and gives a buzz to both the writer and reader. But in doing so, you smear black paint all over the parlor. We're trying to make HN a better place to be than that, so please don't play that game here.

Thanks, dang. It was once true that a surefire way to rack up a large amount of karma in HN was to make a nasty, uncharitable statement like that. I've experienced the weird ridiculous thrill of it myself, on another account, along with the deflating realization that I'm being rewarded (such as it is, karma having no actual value) for participating in the destruction of civilized discourse. I appreciate you actively stepping in and articulating the argument against such "parlor games" and the drive to make HN different in that way, even though I've seen that it doesn't always win you fans in the community.

>karma having no actual value

I believe additional HN abilities are granted based on an account's karma number.

Not really, no. The site karma thresholds are extremely low. They're an anti-abuse measure, not a reward.

You can label and the differences between extremely low karma accounts and 0 karma accounts however you'd like, but a low karma account has more power over the content of the site than a zero karma account.

I also don't think it can be easily ruled out that there are additional, higher karma thresholds upon which an account may be bestowed with additional powers (rate-limit loosening, for example).

It can easily be ruled out by asking us. The highest karma threshold (that I recall, at least) is the downvoting one at 500. Pretty much all the others are 30 or lower.

I feel reasonably confident that there aren't karma rewards for people with more karma than me, although there should be some kind of sick reward for it.

> That's so nastily uncharitable.

> It's a parlor game and gives a buzz to both the writer and reader.

Uh...

I agree that it's a rude and pointless comment, but there's really no reason to go so far with the armchair psychoanalysis.

What strikes you as being particularly psychoanalytic about it? The comment is certainly taking an unnecessarily cynical view of the topic, and doing so is almost always intended to position the author and those who he persuades as superior (i.e. "giving them a buzz").

LunaSea is making an interesting argument that I hadn't considered.

You on the other hand have levied a substance-less complaint about a user's attitude. Who is really undermining discourse here?

Pessimism ought to be welcome here. If you need protection from other people's attitudes go join a university safe space.

It's very easy to be snide, as your last sentence demonstrates; it's much harder, but more valuable, to give thoughtful criticism.

I actually appreciate your point a lot more than it probably seems like I do (not counting the rude bit, which was out of place and wide of the mark). The counterargument only becomes compelling when you start to think practically about the effect snark etc. has on online communities. This is an externality, so it is easy to overlook and not always in the interest of individual actors to take care of.

We could compare it to a company that makes a good product (in this case, a good point about funding and the politics of research) while polluting the local environment (the community here). The solution isn't to ignore the pollution, nor to justify it.

Fortunately for all of us, it's not only possible to make the product without polluting, but the product comes out better when one does so. But this doesn't happen by default; the default is the opposite. That's why I post moderation comments, at the cost of off-topicness. In the long run, the plan (and the unsolved system design problem!) is to get the desired effect without posting such things, which are as tedious to write as they are to read.

Read the comments of the article. It does appear to be a scam.

Even if so, the snark makes it harder to tell that this was the point.

Hey, as long as they buy a new telescope and do their best to make the measurements they're proposing then there's nothing shifty going on here as far as I can make out. Obviously nobody has to give anyone any money. (I am always a little extra skeptical of GoFundMe funds for specific projects though since the funds are transferred even if the goal is not met.)

Just be glad gofundme isn't a YC portfolio company. That would have earned you a full shadowban.

The truth is the opposite. We moderate less, not more, when YC companies are involved. That is literally the first thing PG taught me about how to moderate HN; I don't think I had even sat in a chair yet before he blurted it out.

This does leave a loophole in what people are able to get away with in threads, but it is worth the price to be able to address people's concerns about it in good conscience.

You're getting downvoted into oblivion for the snarkiness of your post, but I'm inclined to agree with you based on things said in the comments at the end of the article, especially by user bllchkchps.

If LunaSea had mentioned those reasons and some supporting evidence, it would have been a better comment. Two of the points raised by bllckchps I've been able to verify for myself:

* The crowd funding campaign goal has been modified since the article was published. The article said the goal was $13,000, but the goal has now changed to $18,000. [1]

* Some of the content on The Center for Planetary Science website is just a cut and paste from Wikipedia with a few words changed. Compare [2] and [3].

[1] https://www.gofundme.com/wow-experiment

[2] http://planetary-science.org/astrophysics/black-holes/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole

Someone in the comments at The Guardian said that the initial goal was actually $10,000. That number has been all over the place.

I'm interested in both crowdfunding and astronomy, but this particular campaign seems like one that should be avoided.

I just logged in today and it's requesting $20,000 now. That part of the campaign alone seems really odd....

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