Bob Yirka is a research scientist at Phys.org.
The zone where the Wow! signal originated was studied by an international team of astronomer. The group describes their study in their paper, which was published in the American Astronomical Society's research notes.
The Big Ear radio telescope recorded a narrowband signal on a paper tape on August 15, 1977. Jerry Ehman, an astronomer at the university, wrote the word Wow! next to the data points after studying the tape and finding a strange signal.
Nobody has been able to explain the origin of the signal since then. No one has taken a detailed survey of where the signal came from. The researchers decided to conduct a dual-telescopic study of the part of the night sky that is thought to be the source of the signal.
The researchers pointed out that the European Space Agency's, Gaia database, which contains data on more than 1 billion stars, had been searched by the man who did the work. The database was used to narrow down the star systems that may have been involved in the Wow! signal. He narrowed down the possibilities to a single star.
The researchers used two telescopes to look at that star system. The stars were pointed at the same time. The Green Bank looked at the star for two hours, while the Allen array looked at it for five minutes. There was a time when the observations overlap.
No sign of a signal was found by the researchers. Their effort showed that their approach could be used to study other signals.
Karen I. Perez and her colleagues wrote about a search for the WOW! The research notes of the American Astronomical Society were published in 1992. There is a book titled "10847/2515-5172/ac9408".
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