Magnetars could zap clouds of atomic hydrogen, producing focused microwave beams.
See full article...
See full article...
Was the Wow! signal actually a space maser?
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
Its kinda wierd how the wow signal has stuck around, but all the more recent ones get rightfully understood as interferance or equipment issues. What makes wow still memorable? Just that it was the first false alarm?
Upvote
-12
(7
/
-19)
I just watched a video about this a few days ago. The Wow! signal has always been an intriguing mystery. I had kind of hoped it would never be solved, but this potential solution is itself pretty strange (in a cool way).
View: https://youtu.be/YqI5HtDFL4I?si=KigzqVjgJrOEsWUT
View: https://youtu.be/YqI5HtDFL4I?si=KigzqVjgJrOEsWUT
Upvote
31
(31
/
0)
Perhaps aliens use magnetar masers for communication? I wonder what sort of message would be important enough to warrant such a powerful system.Damn, I was hoping for aliens
Upvote
41
(42
/
-1)
I suppose the point is that it's hard to show that it is a false alarm. After all, this was a measurement from a campaign to find alien transmissions; it found something that looked like an alien transmission. If it cannot be invalidated as an error, then the original hypothesis still stands and should be investigated.
Upvote
46
(47
/
-1)
Only an advertisement for pornography could conceivably be that powerful...
Upvote
12
(21
/
-9)
Xaser and graser are pretty cool terms, but uvaser and iraser and raser less so.
Upvote
18
(20
/
-2)
Upvote
22
(23
/
-1)
Aren't these all weird arbitrary classifications of a single thing, EM radiation?
They should all be called EMASER.
Upvote
30
(30
/
0)
I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that it might be a more accurate, more likely, or more reasonable explanation...but not a better one. We want aliens.
Upvote
19
(22
/
-3)
These days, if it's at infrared frequencies or above, it's a laser. If it's microwaves or below, it's a maser.
And sorry, but "e-maser" sounds to me like some cheap shovelware desktop maker from the late 90s or early 2000s.
Upvote
61
(62
/
-1)
You will not destroy one of things which featured so prominently in my childhood dreams, Abel Mendez and co-authors!
Upvote
6
(8
/
-2)
I'd say the lack of any signal to view again is proof it wasn't real. Any logical use of signalling another system would require constant and repeated signaling, not just fanning across the sky hoping someone is listening at that very moment. Since we're talking "aliens", then logic must enter the equation.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. WoW utterly lacks most any evidence.
Upvote
-7
(7
/
-14)
"Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus."
Upvote
43
(44
/
-1)
https://xkcd.com/2759/
I like the way this seems to be turning out. For years we just had to wonder what it was but couldn't know. Turns out that it's not what we were looking for at the time, but we still learned something new about the universe.
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
The notion that this would be a signal from an alien race at all is, well, absurd.
I say this from a behavioral point of view. Look at how humans have been beaming shit into space, hoping for a reply some day. We've been doing it for DECADES.
That's how people communicate. We don't just do it once. We do it as often as we think it's needed to get the message across.
A 72 second message in a universe that's 1.513728e+17 seconds old (give or take a few billion) is insanely SHORT. And it never repeating on any scale we understand can only point to a natural phenomenon, not "communication", or even a shout to the wild to echo across the ages.
Communications implies there is going to be someone listening. That we heard something doesn't mean it was "communication". Or even a shout to the universe. When we hear hooves and neighing, we think horses. Not donkeys.
In this case, people are thinking maser-toting, hoofed duck-billed, platypuses. It beggars all sensibility.
The biggest tell is that it didn't repeat, not once, in almost 50 years. You don't send one message to the universe and expect it to be heard. So that tells me, at least, that it wasn't aliens communicating or even saying "hi!" to the universe. It might serve as an example of what aliens trying to communicate with earth might look like on detection gear. But this was a natural phenomenon, and not aliens.
Just like all the other "examples" of alien communication through history. That's because none of that was actually aliens, either.
I say this from a behavioral point of view. Look at how humans have been beaming shit into space, hoping for a reply some day. We've been doing it for DECADES.
That's how people communicate. We don't just do it once. We do it as often as we think it's needed to get the message across.
A 72 second message in a universe that's 1.513728e+17 seconds old (give or take a few billion) is insanely SHORT. And it never repeating on any scale we understand can only point to a natural phenomenon, not "communication", or even a shout to the wild to echo across the ages.
Communications implies there is going to be someone listening. That we heard something doesn't mean it was "communication". Or even a shout to the universe. When we hear hooves and neighing, we think horses. Not donkeys.
In this case, people are thinking maser-toting, hoofed duck-billed, platypuses. It beggars all sensibility.
The biggest tell is that it didn't repeat, not once, in almost 50 years. You don't send one message to the universe and expect it to be heard. So that tells me, at least, that it wasn't aliens communicating or even saying "hi!" to the universe. It might serve as an example of what aliens trying to communicate with earth might look like on detection gear. But this was a natural phenomenon, and not aliens.
Just like all the other "examples" of alien communication through history. That's because none of that was actually aliens, either.
Upvote
35
(43
/
-8)
If you say “Aliens” either you’re making a joke or you are a joke. Might as well just say “It’s God” - at least some people would take that seriously.
Upvote
-19
(2
/
-21)
Upvote
13
(15
/
-2)
Team Tardigrade
Ars Centurion
You know, I have one simple request, and that is to have sharks with frickin' masers attached to their heads!
Upvote
11
(11
/
0)
Except that FRBs (fast radio bursts) are real, despite many thinking for decades that they must be some sort of man-made artifact. Some have recently been found to repeat, many (so far as is known) do not. We still don't know what causes them, although there are a number of candidates.
Upvote
23
(23
/
0)
Hey, I had an e-machines! It did it's job just fine. Almost as good as my compaq from 1988.These days, if it's at infrared frequencies or above, it's a laser. If it's microwaves or below, it's a maser.
And sorry, but "e-maser" sounds to me like some cheap shovelware desktop maker from the late 90s or early 2000s.
Upvote
2
(3
/
-1)
I am not an astrophysicist. But my understanding of a hydrogen maser is that it's going to be pretty much monochromatic at the hydrogen 21cm wavelength (with blurring/redshifting/etc by motion). I very much doubt a magnetar will, though I don't know it for a fact. I didn't catch in the article how narrow- or broadband the signals are.
It's not aliens, but it's really really interesting.
Upvote
8
(8
/
0)
Masers have been found in astrophysical contexts in the past; natural masers definitely exist. However, they need power sources to keep the hydrogen excited, which requires large amounts of energy; usually a star or compact object of some sort. A magnetar would cover perhaps two important bits of interest: they generate huge amounts of power in fairly small regions, and their enormous magnetic fields would likely imprint substantial polarization on any signals.
The real downside of the Wow! signal is how little is known. Even what is known isn't discussed in detail here: is the strength scale logarithmic? What is the spectrum of the signal (if any)? Is anything known about its polarization? If it came from Sagittarius, its source is almost certainly within the Milky Way... What has been done or is known about potential Earthly sources/noise?
Upvote
11
(12
/
-1)
"Fanning across the sky" is how we were listening at the time, and it's obviously more effective than hurling a small satelite with a gold record in one direction and hope someone finds it.
And logic "must" enter the equation? To them, we're the aliens, so does that mean we're somehow a logical species now?
Upvote
1
(3
/
-2)
I agree it was always going to have a natural explanation. But we ourselves have sent onetime messages halfway across the galaxy. So yeah. And lots of radar pulses we used to map various objects in space will be washing across some star systems somewhere. I'm not sure you need an actual conversation of any sort to gain information.
Upvote
10
(10
/
0)
We don’t know how long the signal lasted. 72 s was the duration that any point-origin signal would have been recorded as, due to the effective scanning of the aperture of the detector across the sky. It could have been detected if the signal lasted less than 72 s, but that it was recorded as exactly 72 s implies that it actually had a duration longer than that (but less than 24 hours, as it wasn’t there when that part of the sky passed over the detector again). This is also why the amplitude of the signal appears to rise to a peak then falls. That’s not a characteristic of the signal itself, but of the scanning nature of the detector. For all we know, the signal could have lasted minutes or hours, and been of a constant amplitude.
Last edited:
Upvote
44
(44
/
0)
And evacuation warning for the imminent beginning of construction of a new hyperspace bypass.
Upvote
19
(19
/
0)
"Avoid system XJ6¡!1 at all costs! The people on the third planet are NUTS!"
Upvote
12
(13
/
-1)
Well, most other astronomers I 've read from remain sceptical. An excited hydrogen cloud would explain the narrowband but nobody, so far, has seen a cloud behave as a focusing lens. This doesn't mean they actually don't but until we find another one the issue is still open.
The alien civilization theory has been always kinda difficult to swallow though. I mean, an advanced civilization that uses gazzilion watts for space beacons is kinda like modern humans using 5 miles high lighthouses for navigation. Even if microwaves are the only physically possible tech for long range communication, the supposedly advanced aliens would have probably invented ultra sensitive receivers, rather than ultra powerful transmitters. Even If they use it just as a loudspeaker shouting "we 're here", there are more cost efficient and constant ways to do it.
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
Upvote
6
(6
/
0)
