Wow signal and SETI?

[Mr Manifesto]

I found this article via idleworm.com, but you may as well look at the original source- save a click or two.

The Mysteries of the Wow Wave


Anyone heard of this? Has any alternative explanation been given that might not have been pursued by this article? Somehow the 72 second business makes me think 'malfunction' (maybe it read a star too high or something?) but I know nuthink 'bout stargazin' and stuff, so any ideas/help would be appreciated.

 

[Iconoclast]

From the cited article
The Wow signal's unusual nomenclature connotes both the surprise of the discovery and its sox-knocking strength 60 Janskys in a 10 Khz channel...

60 Janskys in a 10 KHz channel!!! WOW!

And... whaddahell's a Jansky?

Sort of reminds me of this.

 

[espritch]

From the link:

So was the Wow signal our first detection of extraterrestrials?

It might have been, but no scientist would make such a claim. Scientific experiment is inherently, and rightly, skeptical. This isn't just a sour attitude; it's the only way to avoid routinely fooling yourself.

That pretty well sums it up. I don't know if they detected something unusual from space or just interference from Earth or a technical glitch. But unless the signal can be found again, it really doesn't matter since no useful conclusions can be drawn from the information available.

 

[Diamond]

I remember reading that the "WOW" signal came from the locale of a very small number of quite unremarkable stars. Its never been repeated, so it will be filed under "WTF".

Edit: I found the link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1122413.stm

Which is a shame. If wishes meant anything in the Universe, then I wish it was a signal of alien life....

 

[T'ai Chi]

Has SETI passed any "sniff tests" ?

 

[Ratman_tf]

Has SETI passed any "sniff tests" ?

SETI hasn't made any claims. They just listen and hope.

 

[T'ai Chi]

SETI hasn't made any claims. They just listen and hope.

It is not pseudoscience, just parts that are probably bad science.

What about it is falsifiable? They could always say 'oh, we haven't found anything yet.. but we just need to search more.. and search with higher powered instruments' etc. ad infinitum.

Oh, and in no other field could there be something as speculative as the drake equation.

 

[Yahweh]

 

[Ratman_tf]

It is not pseudoscience, just parts that are probably bad science.

Anything specific?

What about it is falsifiable? They could always say 'oh, we haven't found anything yet.. but we just need to search more.. and search with higher powered instruments' etc. ad infinitum.

Perhaps so. Since SETI is privatley funded, and makes no claims, I don't see a problem with them looking to their heart's content. I personally support the search for ET, but I aknowledge that some others don't.

Oh, and in no other field could there be something as speculative as the drake equation.

I think I agree with you there. Everything in the subject of ET life is pretty damn speculative.

 

[espritch]

Oh, and in no other field could there be something as speculative as the drake equation.

The Drake equation looks like a real equation so a lot of people take it to actually mean something (a lot of UFO believers like to trot it out to "prove" their assumptions). The problem of course is that almost none of the parameters involved can really be acurately determined at this point, so any conclusion drawn from it is pure speculation - equation or no equation.

 

[zer0vector]

Re: Re: Wow signal and SETI?

60 Janskys in a 10 KHz channel!!! WOW!

And... whaddahell's a Jansky?

A Jansky is 10^-23 ergs s^-1 cm^-2 Hz^-1 steradian^-1. In case that is a bit obtuse, it's a unit of flux density, basically describing the amount of energy coming from a source, kind of like the magnitude of a star.

60 Jy is pretty high, especially in such a small bandwidth. The brightest sources in the radio sky around 1000 Jy, and there are only a handful of those (Cygnus A, Sag A). At the 60 Jy level there are probably only 100 or so.

 

[Iconoclast]

Re: Re: Re: Wow signal and SETI?

A Jansky is 10^-23 ergs s^-1 cm^-2 Hz^-1 steradian^-1. In case that is a bit obtuse, it's a unit of flux density, basically describing the amount of energy coming from a source, kind of like the magnitude of a star.

Thanks ZV!

 

[tracer]

Wait a minute ... why are both square centimeters and steradians on the bottom of the fraction (in that definition of a Jansky)?

 

[zer0vector]

Wait a minute ... why are both square centimeters and steradians on the bottom of the fraction (in that definition of a Jansky)?

The square centimeters takes into account the r^-2 behavior of any radiation field. Basically the power through a spherical surface of radius r drops off as inverse of the square of r. This can then be related to the effective area of your detector, which determines how much of thie power you can collect.

The steradians deals with the case where you have an extended source in the sky. Since no source is perfectly pointlike, it's angular size must be taken into account.

 

[tracer]

Oh ... so the "per square centimeter" part deals with the size of your collector, and the "per steradian" part deals with the size of your source. Gotcha. (Hmmm ... the stellar magnitude system doesn't take the angular size of the source into account. Is there an equivalent Jansky-like unit that doesn't have steradians in the denominator?)

BTW ... isn't Hz^-1 another way of saying "seconds"?

 

[zer0vector]

Oh ... so the "per square centimeter" part deals with the size of your collector, and the "per steradian" part deals with the size of your source. Gotcha. (Hmmm ... the stellar magnitude system doesn't take the angular size of the source into account. Is there an equivalent Jansky-like unit that doesn't have steradians in the denominator?)

BTW ... isn't Hz^-1 another way of saying "seconds"?

You're right, magnitudes don't deal with any structure of the source, but the Jansky was defined in radio astronomy, where just about everything is extended. Stars are pretty much invisible in the radio, so what you do get is mostly ionized gas, high velocity gasses, or ions moving in magnetic fields. As such, I'm not sure if there is a single unit defined as being Jy * steradian.

Yes, technically Hz^-1 is a second, but it makes more sense to say it that way since it relates directly to the frequency bandwidth of your system.

 

[Undesired Walrus]

Single greatest image ever, in my opinion.

Why isn't there more press on the Wow signal these days? As I thought they established it was hard for that signal to come from a supernova or something similar.

 

[Beerina]

It is not pseudoscience, just parts that are probably bad science.

What about it is falsifiable? They could always say 'oh, we haven't found anything yet.. but we just need to search more.. and search with higher powered instruments' etc. ad infinitum.

It no more needs to be falsifiable than does an archaelogical expidition or an expedition a hundred and fifty years ago to some island in the Pacific nobody's ever been to, just looking for stuff. Animals. Traces of people. Whatever.

It's the find-and-categorize wing of science.

And in any case, the more they don't find, as the years stretch into decades, and then into centuries, that, too, is an interesting development.

It might be more fruitful to search for signs of life, intelligent or otherwise, i.e. chemical signatures of living cells or whatever, though how that would be done at interstellar distances this side of using the sun as a gravitational lense, I don't know.

Oh, and in no other field could there be something as speculative as the drake equation.

The Drake equation was intended as something to think about, not as an actual calculating device.

It will only be mildly accurate probably after thoroughly examining (as in going there) at least a decent sized chunk of our own galaxy.*









* Or finally talking to someone who has.

 

[Diagoras]

Oh, and in no other field could there be something as speculative as the drake equation.

In what other field is there less evidence to go on? The Drake equation is just a conceptual tool to grasp a rough idea of the scale of probabilities we're dealing with. When you really don't know hardly anything about the existence of life elsewhere in the universe, all you can do is speculate and look. And that's what they're doing. What's your objection?

Even if we don't find anything, that tells us something. It tells us we're special. And in my book, that's something worth knowing.

 

[T'ai Chi]

Even if we don't find anything, that tells us something. It tells us we're special. And in my book, that's something worth knowing.

Well that can never happen, because one can always say 'the universe is infinite/very large, and even though we didn't find anything at time t, we could have found something at time t+1. Or heck, the aliens may be in another universe all together! So let's keep looking.'