{"id":279705,"date":"2025-10-05T14:44:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-05T14:44:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/279705\/"},"modified":"2025-10-05T14:44:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-05T14:44:10","slug":"mysterious-comet-might-explain-a-signal-beamed-at-earth-48-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/279705\/","title":{"rendered":"Mysterious Comet Might Explain a Signal Beamed at Earth 48 Years Ago"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You may be familiar with the famous \u201cWow!\u201d signal. If you\u2019re not familiar with the story, back in 1977, a radio telescope at Ohio State University detected a 72-second radio burst from space. Astronomer Jerry Ehman circled the printout with a red pen and wrote the word \u201cwow!\u201d beside it.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ve never heard such a signal again. There was no follow-up\u2014just a one-time 72-second burst in a narrowband radiofrequency that has puzzled researchers for years. There have been theories, of course. And today, we get a brand-new one from our favorite Harvard astronomer\u2014and the guy who thinks every inexplicable space occurrence is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vice.com\/en\/article\/that-mysterious-comet-heading-toward-us-might-be-an-alien-ship-sending-out-probes\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">probably aliens<\/a>\u2014Avi Loeb.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve written about him <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vice.com\/en\/article\/this-mysterious-object-from-our-solar-system-might-be-a-planet-making-seed\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">a lot recently<\/a>, mostly because he\u2019s fun and seems more hopeful than crazy. And if you guess that a mysterious space occurrence is \u201caliens\u201d enough times, eventually you\u2019ll be right.<\/p>\n<p>As you\u2019d imagine, he interprets every odd behavior of the mysterious 3I\/ATLAS space object as being yet another example of how that thing is somehow of alien origin. Even though NASA scientists, expressing an abundance of caution and restraint, assume it\u2019s just a regular old comet that\u2019s just doing weird things. <\/p>\n<p>Occam\u2019s razor and all that.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"536\" width=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Even-Our-Best-Telescopes-Cant-Figure-Out-This-Weird-Comet.jpg\" alt=\"Even Our Best Telescopes Can\u2019t Figure Out This Weird Comet\" class=\"wp-image-1902975\"  \/>NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/p>\n<p>Remember That Signal Beamed at Earth in the 1970s? Scientists May Have Found the Source.<\/p>\n<p>Loeb posits that the mysterious \u201cWow!\u201d signal might have a source. That source might have been <a href=\"https:\/\/avi-loeb.medium.com\/was-the-wow-signal-emitted-from-3i-atlas-d18d4f0d1f1e\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">3I\/ATLAS<\/a>, whatever it is. <\/p>\n<p>3I\/ATLAS was discovered this year, and it\u2019s only the third known visitor from beyond our solar system. According to Loeb, it\u2019s potentially a technologically advanced floating space\u2026thing from a distant civilization.<\/p>\n<p>Loeb crunched some numbers and found that the object and the \u201cWow!\u201d signal came from eerily similar directions. The odds of that being a random alignment? About 0.6 percent, he says. Low, in other words.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a problem with that: in 1977, 3I\/ATLAS would\u2019ve been about 600 astronomical units away, which is roughly in the neighborhood of 55 billion miles. For it to beam a signal all the way to the earth from 55 billion miles away, it would\u2019ve needed a transmitter powered with something like a nuclear reactor.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s also the fact that no telescope has detected any transmissions from 3I\/ATLAS. So, Loeb is calling for what essentially amounts to a police stakeout of a space object. Round-the-clock surveillance in the hope of capturing some signal emitted from 3I\/ATLAS that could potentially reveal it to be a stealthy alien artifact\u2026or whatever it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You may be familiar with the famous \u201cWow!\u201d signal. If you\u2019re not familiar with the story, back in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":279706,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[39035,4514,38755,2252,50,159,783,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-279705","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-3i-atlas","9":"tag-astronomy","10":"tag-comet","11":"tag-life","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-space","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115322098060162362","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279705\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}