The weird radio signal from 1977

A lone radio burst from deep space still baffles scientists today

By Smartasaurus· 2 min read Cosmic

he spots a sequence of letters and numbers that shouldn't exist

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The short version

A lone radio burst from deep space still baffles scientists today
In the decades since, we have pointed our most powerful arrays back at that exact coordinate in the dark.
The signal might be repeating right now, just far enough to the left that we are missing it.

Jerry Ehman was circling characters on a computer printout when he saw something that shouldn't exist. Among the static of the cosmos, he found a vertical column of letters and numbers: 6EQUJ5.

He grabbed a red pen, circled the sequence, and wrote "Wow!" in the margin. He had just seen the loudest, clearest signal ever captured from deep space.

The Big Ear radio telescope was scanning the sky near the Sagittarius constellation on August 15, 1977. It didn't find a hum or a murmur. It found a blast of radio energy exactly thirty times stronger than the background noise of the universe.

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