By Xeno
On August 17, 1977, Ohio State University astronomer Jerry Ehman was sitting at his kitchen table, pouring over pages of printouts from the SETI Project’s Big Ear radio telescope’s computers. On these pages were line after line of numbers and letters. A cluster of six characters jumped out at Ehman and he circled them in red ink. Next to that circle he wrote: “Wow!”.
SETI stands for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, and in the 34 years since Ehman’s discovery astronomers have been agonizing over the precise meaning of what has become known as the “Wow! signal”. It’s non-terrestrial in origin, meaning it’s not man-made and didn’t originate from Earth. Wow! was traced back to a cluster of 100,000 densely packed... More...
