The New "Wow!" Signal - SETI's Recent Close Encounter With An Unidentified Emission

reply to post by LABTECH767


Blacknight has always been a hot topic in DOD circles. Of course some sites know more than others. I can say from people I trust it is real and is still there. Despite attempts to try and retrieve. Apparently it is still active and some of the stories about it maybe true.

It is a fun subject around the bar on tdy. This was all as of a few years ago so not sure about now. I can say everyone will be surprised in the end at what the military has and can do. Then again, we may never be told lol.

The Bot

The question about the radial velocity of the star from which the candidate SETI signal came, TYC 1220-91-1, seems a most relevant one. Without this we have the very real possibility that a random bit of terrestrial interference, one of thousands, eventually happened to fall near the 'magic frequency' of 4462.3 MHz.
Given the radial velocity we could confirm that the true frequency, as sent, was essentially identical to the hydrogen times PI magic frequency. The odds of that happening, due to random terrestrial interference, seems very low, and would appear to very much strengthen the true SETI signal hypothesis.
From what I read, determining the radial velocity of a star doesn't seem to be particularly difficult, given the necessary specialized knowledge and access to professional grade equipment. It seems more a problem of taking the trouble to observe the light of this one, obscure star, out of a million or so, at or above its level of brightness, via the spectroscope.

some huge spacecraft have been detected so why couldn't these signals be coming from them? I read the bit about engines sending out large pulses of energy, and these craft could be miles across. So in fact we could be picking up the signal signatures when they go super luminal or into hyperspeed or whatever they do. Just because there is a star in the area of the signal does not mean that the signal was that far away, does it? Can originating distance be accurately determined with Doppler shift?

I read a paper once which suggested that many of the distance measurements are done using a form of estimation based on 'known' distances of other stars because the full calculation is complicated and takes a while to do. I think the point was made that these 'known' distances are based on estimated calculations and so compound the errors of 'known' star distances.

Crowd funding could provide a way for a bunch of people to buy and set up a dedicated receiving system (discussed at the start of the thread)

Doppler shift data can not directly tell us the distance to a signal source. A radio signal emitted by an interstellar space vessel traveling at a substantial fraction of the speed of light would be shifted upward in frequency, on approach, or downward, on departure far more than a signal from any planet we would be at all likely to detect.

Greys already gave you humans designs for their own listening device.

Why does your species persist in using .. oh yeah Money..

en.wikipedia.org...

My Friend, I know that wow signal. Stephen William Hawkings told that the wow signal is came from aliens. WOW Signal

The thing about this signal is that it is one of the twenty or so "magic frequencies" out of an almost Saganesque "billions and billions" possible...pi times H. That means:
1) it was a Benford beacon and we intercepted it crossing Earth in the sky.
2) By a millions to one fluke, it was a ET radar accidentally put on that frequency, or deliberately so in the millions to one hope that someone might be listening.
Or of course, it was terrestrial interference or some unknown natural phenomena.

originally posted by: TomMazanec
The thing about this signal is that it is one of the twenty or so "magic frequencies" out of an almost Saganesque "billions and billions" possible...pi times H. That means:
1) it was a Benford beacon and we intercepted it crossing Earth in the sky.
2) By a millions to one fluke, it was a ET radar accidentally put on that frequency, or deliberately so in the millions to one hope that someone might be listening.
Or of course, it was terrestrial interference or some unknown natural phenomena.

Exactly, and this is why it was thousands of times more interesting than the Fast Radio Bursts from an SETI perspective. It's a shame it never repeated.

The best project I can think of for followup would involve a network of amateur radio astronomers/SETI researchers monitoring that area of sky at that and other magic frequencies 24/7. It's highly impractical for the SETI Institute or other professional SETI programs to just "sit and stare" at this one star.


It's something Project Argus could perhaps do but I know very little about what their members individual capabilities are (ie: frequency ranges, sensitivity, geographical location, etc).

Someone should bring this up to them though.

Hi, guys. I stumbled upon this forum, and was amazed by this thread, so I googled everything I could about this signal, and, strangely, or not, I found very, very little info. However, on what I did find- the pdf you so kindly linked in the post I found something that confuses me. Unfortunately, I'm kind of a noob with math and related stuff (social sciences education, not that I'm complaining hey ), but anyway, here is the problem:

The star in question is TYC 1220-91-1, right? That means coordinates:
RA= 2h 08m 29s
Dec= 22 26 59

However, in the pdf, the coordinates are
RA= 22.441734h
Dec= 79.812852

When I tried to convert them online, I got:

RA= 22h 26m 30s
Dec= 79 48 46.26

And that's by faaar of the coordinates of TYC 1220-91-1. So, PLEASE, help, I'm so intrigued by this whole subject (lol, not gonna sleep tonight ), and really wanna know where I'm making mistake! Is it the different catalogs or maybe, coordinates can't be converted by sites I used?

Thanx in advance

originally posted by: Snailien
Hi, guys. I stumbled upon this forum, and was amazed by this thread, so I googled everything I could about this signal, and, strangely, or not, I found very, very little info. However, on what I did find- the pdf you so kindly linked in the post

I found something that confuses me. Unfortunately, I'm kind of a noob with math and related stuff (social sciences education, not that I'm complaining hey

), but anyway, here is the problem:

The star in question is TYC 1220-91-1, right? That means coordinates:
RA= 2h 08m 29s
Dec= 22 26 59

However, in the pdf, the coordinates are
RA= 22.441734h
Dec= 79.812852

When I tried to convert them online, I got:

RA= 22h 26m 30s
Dec= 79 48 46.26

And that's by faaar of the coordinates of TYC 1220-91-1. So, PLEASE, help, I'm so intrigued by this whole subject (lol, not gonna sleep tonight

), and really wanna know where I'm making mistake! Is it the different catalogs or maybe, coordinates can't be converted by sites I used?

Thanx in advance

Maybe we have never redetected any signals cause someone made a math mistake in something everyone uses.

a reply to: Snailien

The closest thing I could find using simbad
simbad.u-strasbg.fr...

is TYC 4608-978-1
simbad.u-strasbg.fr...

But there is no exact match. So yeah...

a reply to: JadeStar

Do not be dissuaded JadeStar; I'm a 53 year old man who read his first book on radio astronomy in the 7th grade.
Your OP is intelligent, well constructed, exciting, and above all passionate. May others take note.

a reply to: moebius

Yeah, same.
So, I guess, my question will be, where did TYC 1220-91-9 come from?

originally posted by: Xeven
Hi, guys. I stumbled upon this forum, and was amazed by this thread, so I googled everything I could about this signal, and, strangely, or not, I found very, very little info. However, on what I did find- the pdf you so kindly linked in the post

I found something that confuses me. Unfortunately, I'm kind of a noob with math and related stuff (social sciences education, not that I'm complaining hey

), but anyway, here is the problem:

The star in question is TYC 1220-91-1, right? That means coordinates:
RA= 2h 08m 29s
Dec= 22 26 59

However, in the pdf, the coordinates are
RA= 22.441734h
Dec= 79.812852

When I tried to convert them online, I got:

RA= 22h 26m 30s
Dec= 79 48 46.26

And that's by faaar of the coordinates of TYC 1220-91-1. So, PLEASE, help, I'm so intrigued by this whole subject (lol, not gonna sleep tonight

), and really wanna know where I'm making mistake! Is it the different catalogs or maybe, coordinates can't be converted by sites I used?

Thanx in advance

originally posted by: Xeven

originally posted by: Snailien
Hi, guys. I stumbled upon this forum, and was amazed by this thread, so I googled everything I could about this signal, and, strangely, or not, I found very, very little info. However, on what I did find- the pdf you so kindly linked in the post

I found something that confuses me. Unfortunately, I'm kind of a noob with math and related stuff (social sciences education, not that I'm complaining hey

), but anyway, here is the problem:

The star in question is TYC 1220-91-1, right? That means coordinates:
RA= 2h 08m 29s
Dec= 22 26 59

However, in the pdf, the coordinates are
RA= 22.441734h
Dec= 79.812852

When I tried to convert them online, I got:

RA= 22h 26m 30s
Dec= 79 48 46.26

And that's by faaar of the coordinates of TYC 1220-91-1. So, PLEASE, help, I'm so intrigued by this whole subject (lol, not gonna sleep tonight

), and really wanna know where I'm making mistake! Is it the different catalogs or maybe, coordinates can't be converted by sites I used?

Thanx in advance

Maybe we have never redetected any signals cause someone made a math mistake in something everyone uses.

originally posted by: Snailien
a reply to: moebius

Yeah, same.

So, I guess, my question will be, where did TYC 1220-91-9 come from?

Guys this has to be the most embarrassing thing I've ever posted on ATS but I am sorry to say that I made an incredible mistake misidentifying the star from coordinates mentioned in the original paper. (more on that soon)

One mistake was mine in not checking my work there. The other comes from a mistake made in the paper itself (see below).

I do not even remember how I arrived at TYC-1220-91-1 other than I think when I originally converted the coordinates given in the paper I had TYC-1220-91 in a separate spreadsheet for some reason.

I never went back and rechecked the co-ordinates from the paper but I should have!

Had I done so my error would have been readily apparent. I knew I made a mistake when I saw this thread pop up again a week or two ago and had planned on making a correction to it.

Anyway, that said I feel that I now have correctly identified what I believe to be the star referenced in the research paper. I also noticed that the coordinates in the screenshot of the chart in the research paper have changed since I published the original post last spring. I have both copies of the research paper so obviously it was edited.

Original page from March 2014


Current page from May 2015


Notice the difference? The original says RA 32.211809 and Dec 22.441734. The current paper says RA 22.441734 and Dec 79.812.852

BIG DIFFERENCE!

I did some quick sleuthing and located the likely star from the HabCat catalog referenced in the above diagram from the paper. You can download HabCat in .csv form here

So the star they were pointing at is HIP 110773 (from the Hipparcos catalog obviously). It is also known as BD+79 738.

It shows up in HabCat as HabCat Star #15906

Sky position: RA 22h 26.32m (22.44225), Dec +79° 48.55.1' (79.8153055) which is pretty damn close to RA 22.441734 and Dec 79.812.852 as given in the modified newer version of the paper on ArXiv. So close that it is almost certainly the star the paper referenced.



FYI It is a type G5 star (Same general classification as our Sun but just slightly cooler than our Sun).

It is in the constellation Cepheus.

It is around 142 light years away.

The tilde "~" sign in astronomical and other scientific papers means "around" so when the paper said "~100 LY" they meant around 100 Light-Years. In the context of cosmic distances 142 Light-Years is in "around 100 light years".

It has an apparent visual magnitude of 9.32 so too dim for naked eye viewing but a it should be no problem for a decent sized amateur telescope.

It is the target of several searches for extrasolar planets both through radial velocity and transit spectroscopy.

For the purposes of the original post, nothing really changes other than the star in question. Both stars are very similar to our Sun. TYC-1220-91-1 slightly more so than HIP 110773 but the other fact are pretty much the same.


fyi: I am hella busy with school right now but I plan to re-write the original post to reflect the new information if that is appropriate?

Or should I just leave it as it is because the research paper was clearly edited and that screen shot serves as evidence that someone somewhere made a mistake?

As this is a conspiracy site I can already hear people thinking up all sorts of reasons the paper was changed so it might make sense to keep it as is but with an edit noting that the paper had been changed.

PS: I'll also see whatever else I can get on this star which may be of interest to those reading this thread. If you are in the mood you can do so as well.

By the way, if one goes to the page of the abstract of the paper they will notice that the new version of the paper was submitted on March 17, 2014.

Or about 2 weeks after I posted this thread.

I suspect this ATS thread caused a few questions and the paper's authors were asked questions (perhaps by media) about why no star with the position given in the original paper existed in HabCat.

Take a look....

Submission history
From: Gerald Harp Ph.D. [view email]
[v1] Tue, 27 Nov 2012 22:44:02 GMT (1926kb)
[v2] Mon, 17 Mar 2014 00:42:54 GMT (1909kb)

a reply to: JadeStar

Oooohh...be careful JadeStar - the PTB might pick you up on their radar


For what it's worth, I think you should leave the thread as is, for the very reason that you state - because it "serves as evidence that someone somewhere made a mistake".

Aren't the SETI crowd looking at KIC 8462852? I was just thinking to myself that PI or e would be good places to look for intelligent signals in the witless noise of the Universe. Then, shock horror, here PI*H shows up as a real signal. I was especially interested with the suggestion here to look for PI*He, PI*Li, PI*Be, PI*B, PI*C, PI*N, PI*O, PI*Fl and PI*Ne. I was also theorizing that perhaps, with a more accurate number to focus on, there might be gain in the strength of the signal. H just goes as far as we can accurately measure it, but PI is a transcendental number and infinitely expandable. As is e, the base of the natural logarithm, although, any human expansion used for calculation is necessarily finite, however colossal.

a reply to: JadeStar

I read this "My theory is that if this signal was in fact from a transmitter 100 light years away, that transmitter was not being used as a beacon for us but rather was being used in a similar way as we use the Arecibo planetary radar, which by the way, can also be detected 100 light years away."
and feel compelled to refute this statement.

100 light years is both a measure of distance and time.

Arecibo has only been operating since around 1963. As a result, it's transmissions from that time period, will have reached a distance of, 53 light years. So, arecibo cannot be detected at a distance of 100 light years. In another 47 years, arecibo signas can be detected at a distance of 100 light years.