Sunday, May 18, 2008

Wow! Signal on Seti@home classic



Taken from: http://ww.planetary.org/html/UPDATES/...

The "Wow!" signal as it would appear on SETI@home. Note that in reality the "Wow!" signal could never be captured on SETI@home, becuse it originated in a part of the sky that is not covered by the Arecibo radio telescope. Furthermore, the signal bears the mark of the radio telescope that detected it, Big Ear. Whereas Arecibo's beam takes 12 seconds to cross any given point in the sky, Big Ear, with a wider beam, takes 37 seconds. As a result, the "Wow!" signal's gaussian is three times as wide as a genuine SETI@home signal would be.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Interesting post. I didn't know that Arecibo did not cover that part of the sky.
My own system does and the WOW area comes into view once in a while. You can see what I hear at:
http://www.seti.net/html/SETINet/Archive/RA19/WOW/wow.htm

Regards....... Jim