Signal Source Wow! there could be comets, not aliens

One of the most interesting events for the entire time of space exploration is the registration of the so-called Wow! Signal in 1977. Then astronomers were very actively looking for traces of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Universe (they are still looking for them), and it is believed that this signal can be just such a trace / signal given by an extraterrestrial civilization.

Since then, astronomy has gone a long time ahead, space exploration technologies are being improved. Now many scientists are no longer convinced that the Wow signal! is the work of another civilization. A team of scientists from the United States, in particular, believes that the signal could be two comets that passed through a group of Chi stars of the constellation Sagittarius from July 27 to August 15, 1977.

The nuclei of these comets, as scientists have found, are surrounded by very large clouds of hydrogen. The radius of such a cloud reaches several million kilometers. Perhaps these clouds were the source of the signal, which was recorded many years ago. The comets themselves were discovered only in 2005, and immediately did not pay much attention to them, they simply cataloged them. Nevertheless, the signal source was in 1977 precisely in the area where the comets were.

Of course, the stated point of view also has opponents. So, some NASA experts say that cometary clouds emanate at different wavelengths, and not at 21-centimeter waves. James Bauer of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena also believes that a comet signal, even if it exists, cannot be compared in strength to Wow! Nevertheless, the authors of the idea of ​​the comet origin of the signal will be able to verify it - this will happen on January 25, 2017, as well as on January 7, 2018. On these dates, comets will reappear in the solar system, first 266P / Christensen and then P / 2008 Y2.

As for Wow !, Wikipedia tells us the following: “The circled code 6EQUJ5 describes the change in the intensity of the received signal over time. Each line on the printout corresponded to a 12-second interval (10 seconds of listening to the broadcast itself and 2 seconds of subsequent computer processing). In order to save space on the printout, the intensities were encoded with alphanumeric characters: a space indicates the intensity from 0 to 0.999 ..; digits 1–9 - intensities from the corresponding intervals from 1,000 to 9,999 ...; intensities starting at 10.0 were encoded with letters (for example, 'A' meant intensity from 10.0 to 10.999 ..., 'B' from 11.0 to 11.999 ..., etc.). The letter 'U' (intensity between 30.0 and 30.999 ...) was met only once during the entire operation of the radio telescope. Intensities in this case are dimensionless signal-to-noise ratios; the noise intensity in each frequency band was taken as the average value for the several previous minutes. ”

By the way, not so long ago an interesting explanation was discovered for other mysterious signals regularly received by scientists in Australia working with the Parks radio telescope. For 17 years, astronomers received some strange signals, about once or twice a year. And for the first time such signals, called "peritons", were received in 1998. To the credit of scientists, it must be said that almost immediately an assumption was made about the terrestrial origin of the “peritons”. The fact is that the signals did not come from a certain part of space, but came from everywhere immediately, from all over the firmament. Scientists decided that the source of the signal was some atmospheric phenomena (possibly lightning).

But everything turned out to be simpler - the signal was given by the microwave .