Wow! Signal follow-ups
Over the years, many other astronomers have followed-up on the Wow! Signal, either trying to explain it away or relocate it. But to astronomers like Shostak, the signal is really just one of many similar detections made over the years.
“In those days, it was very common to pick up these kinds of signals just one time,” Shostak says. “Computers didn't have the power to do real time follow-ups. If you picked it up today, the comp would say ‘Wow!,’ and astronomers would start nodding the telescope in the direction of the Wow! Signal to try to figure out what it was.” Once observatory computers became sophisticated enough for real-time follow-ups, the number of mystery signals dropped. “The aliens knew we had better equipment,” Shostak jokingly says.
For example, in the past few years, astronomers have discovered fast radio bursts (FRBs), which were initially seen as strong radio signals that appeared just once. The discovery of FRBs, as well as the progress made tracking down their origins, has been one of the biggest recent breakthroughs in astronomy.
Meanwhile, Shostak sees the Wow! Signal fixation as something the public is interested in far more than astronomers are.
“I get emails at least once a month from people who look at that printout and interpret those data in all sorts of ways,” he says. People often see it as an alien code that’s being sent as a direct message to humans. They don’t realize the combination of numbers and letters on the printout was just a convention set by [human] astronomers working at the observatory. The printouts couldn’t handle numbers larger than nine, so the display cycles through letters, starting with “B,” for each increasing order of intensity.
“People think they’ve figured out what the message is or how big the aliens are,” Shostak adds. “And it's like a dozen numbers, and all that printout does is give you the level of intensity.”
But even if it was humanity's first message from aliens, Ehman still doesn't have a guess at to what it could have said.
“Who knows?,” he says. “I have no idea what might have been contained in the message, if anything.”