Amateur astronomer and YouTuber Alberto Caballero, one of the founders of
The Exoplanets Channel, has found a small amount of evidence for a source
of the notorious Wow! signal. Phys.Org reports: Back in 1977, astronomers
working with the Big Ear Radio Telescope — at the time, situated in
Delaware, Ohio — recorded a unique signal from somewhere in space. It
was so strong and unusual that one of the workers on the team, Jerry
Ehman, famously scrawled the word Wow! on the printout. Despite years of
work and many man hours, no one has ever been able to trace the source of
the signal or explain the strong, unique signal, which lasted for all of
72 seconds. Since that time, many people have suggested the only
explanation for such a strong and unique signal is extraterrestrial
intelligent life. In this new effort, Caballero reasoned that if the
source was some other life form, it would likely be living on an
exoplanet — and if that were the case, it would stand to reason that
such a life form might be living on a planet similar to Earth — one
circling its own sun-like star. Pursuing this logic, Caballero began
searching the publicly available Gaia database for just such a star. The
Gaia database has been assembled by a team working at the Gaia
observatory run by the European Space Agency. Launched back in 2013, the
project has worked steadily on assembling the best map of the night sky
ever created. To date, the team has mapped approximately 1.3 billion
stars. In studying his search results, Caballero found what appears to
fit the bill — a star (2MASS 19281982-2640123) that is very nearly a
mirror image of the sun — and is located in the part of the sky where
the Wow! signal originated. He notes that there are other possible
candidates in the area but suggests his candidate might provide the best
launching point for a new research effort by astronomers who have the
tools to look for exoplanets. Caballero shared his findings via arXiv. …
