Kartavya Kant Tiwari

The 1977 “Wow!” signal from the Big Ear radio telescope in Ohio has long puzzled astronomers. It was a brief, narrow-band radio burst lasting 72 seconds – so striking that astronomer Jerry Ehman famously wrote “Wow!” on the data printout. Despite decades of study, its origin remained unknown and no repeat signal has been found. In 2025, a multi-author international team re-examined these decades-old analog records using advanced computing methods. Their paper provides corrections and new insights into the signal and its possible origin. Modern Data Analysis of the Wow! Signal According to the study, volunteers digitized old Big Ear telescope logs using optical-character-recognition software. This allowed detailed recalculation of the signal's parameters. They narrowed the sky region (boosting location certainty by two-thirds) and adjusted the frequency from 1420.4556 to 1420.726 MHz. In practical terms, that frequency change implies the radio source was moving faster than previousl...