Famous ‘Wow!’ Signal Might Have Actually Been a Natural Space Laser : ScienceAlert | Space

A super powerful space laser could be the source of a mysterious signal that has puzzled astronomers for nearly 50 years.

No, not a warning shot from an alien civilization, but rather the work of a hydrogen cloud and a neutron star; the dense core of a massive star after a supernova blew its viscera out into space.

A new hypothesis suggests that under the right circumstances, such an object could produce a signal just like one that surprised astronomer Jerry Ehman on 15 August 1977, prompting him to write the word “Wow!” on the printout.

The research, available as a preprint on arXiv, is undergoing revisions, but the findings so far are based on newly discovered detections of similar signals, suggesting that the team led by astrobiologist Abel Méndez of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo is on the right track.

“Our latest observations, made between February and May 2020, have revealed similar narrowband signals near the hydrogen line, though less intense than the original Wow! signal,” Méndez explains.

That original signal was spotted by Ehman in data collected by the Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope. Lasting just 72 seconds in total, it was an extremely powerful flash of radio waves near the 1420 MHz hydrogen line, the wavelength emitted by hydrogen when it changes its spin orientation.

Given hydrogen’s ubiquitous presence throughout the Universe,…