Between these two elements lay a large, flat ground plane area of aluminum-covered pavement. It consisted of a large, flat reflector section of steel mesh standing across an open space from a wide, stationary paraboloid reflector. The design of the telescope would be extremely simple, especially compared to the more typical fully steerable dish antenna. Kraus first described his idea for a telescope capable of detecting extraterrestrial radio signals in an article for Scientific American in 1955.
Kraus was no stranger to big science - during WWII he developed methods for degaussing naval ships to protect them from magnetically detonated mines, and he worked on a massive cyclotron for the University of Michigan.ĭr. Affectionately known as “The Big Ear”, the Ohio State University Radio Observatory was the vision of John D. Understanding the Wow! Signal requires a look at the instrument that produced it. Source: North American Astrophysical Observatory. If it was sent from a region of space with habitable planets, it’s at least worth a listen. How we came to hear this signal, what it could possibly mean, and where it might have come from are all interesting details of an event that left a mystery in its wake, one that citizen scientists are now looking into with a fresh perspective. When the data was analyzed later, an astronomer’s marginal exclamation of the extraordinarily powerful but vanishingly brief blip would give the signal its forever name: the Wow! Signal. Shortly after 10:00 PM, the Earth’s rotation slewed the telescope through a powerful radio signal whose passage was noted only by the slight change in tone in the song sung every twelve seconds by the line printer recording that evening’s data. On a balmy August evening in 1977, an enormous radio telescope in a field in the middle of Ohio sat silently listening to the radio universe.
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