Talk:Wow! signal

Clarification on the time

The article notes "the Big Ear could observe any given point for just 72 seconds". Is that 36 seconds per horn? Or is there some overlap? Looking at some images online it appears the two feedhorn arrays are well separated using vertical fencing on the sides of the horns, but the horns are so thin horizontally that they will have to have a wide acceptance angle. I cannot find any details that really clarifies how it worked. Maury Markowitz (talk) 15:31, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

I also do not fully understand the organization/orientation/spatial acuity of the antennae vis-a-vis Earth's rotational axis, so what follows is a bit (make that a large bit) of hand waving, but if the horns are so thin horizontally that they will have to have a wide acceptance angle, then shouldn't the signal have been detected by both horns, rather than just one? JoJo Anthrax (talk) 16:20, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

That is precisely why I ask :-) The fact that it was in only one horn suggests equipment origins. That depends on just what the angles were like. Maury Markowitz (talk)

No, the horns were pointed at different areas of the sky (as indicated by this image). The Earth rotates at a rate where the 'scope can only see any given point for 72 seconds. Think about it like if you were looking through a spyglass and spinning around in a slow circle - a tree enters your field of view, and you'll see it for a certain amount of time before it leaves the field of view. The primary uncertainty in the source of the signal is actually due to the two-horn setup and the fact that only one horn received the signal but both signals were then merged (as explained a bit in this section). Primefac (talk) 10:33, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

But but but...if the horns were pointed at different areas of the sky - I assume the two red marks in the figure - that's different from how binoculars/spyglasses work, in which a single field is sampled by two optical detection mechanisms (of course from two slightly different directions). I have always assumed, with reference to that figure, that the horns swept across the sky in a generally left-to-right or right-to-left (or some angle to it) manner, such that a single point in the scanned field would be sampled twice, implying that the signal source, if extraterrestrial in origin, should have been sampled twice. Alternatively, the sweep might be close to the horns' long axis - up-to-down or down-to-up in the figure - such that two different fields were sampled simultaneously, in which case it is tough to identify any stellar object as a signal source. I suspect, however, that my typical MO is at play here, meaning that I am completely at sea. Any and all clarification/correction/education would be welcome! Thanks in advance. JoJo Anthrax (talk) 20:29, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

Yes, the sweep was right to left. If you assume stationary, continuous contacts, any new contact should always be in the east horn, so there was no need spend money on stuff to figure out which horn saw it. (this was the 70s, computers and electronics were expensive). The design just didn't account for the possibility that something would appear or disappear in the interval in between. I think the assumption was that would mean it was something a lot closer than they were interested in. If they got a hit on the first horn, which was doing a wide scan, the plan was that the second following horn could be tuned to do a narrower frequency scan to get better information. MrOllie (talk) 21:04, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation, MrOllie. If I understand that correctly, it seems remarkable that a single, necessarily incredibly strong extraterrestrial source would just happen to appear or disappear during the brief interval between the two horns, and never emerge again. And by remarkable, I suppose I also mean highly unlikely. JoJo Anthrax (talk) 23:57, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

This is precisely the issue that prompted this question. Yet the article does not consider this timing issue in the "hypotheses" section. Surely there is some citable discussion of the absolutely fabulous timing this would require? Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:10, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

Hacker

Why hasn't the possibility of a hacker been proposed? In the end it's just some data, some letters on paper. Hackers are known to be real. Alien lighthouses, not so much. It seems about a billion times more likely. 137.186.209.180 (talk) 18:07, 1 May 2023 (UTC)