Is Something in Space Talking to Us? | StarTalk

So there are some signals that exist in the record books. Right? And to some, that means the aliens have already tried to contact us. In 1977, the Ohio State University had a big radio telescope. It's been turned, I think, into a golf course now. But one morning, one of the astronomers, a guy by the name of Jerry Ehman, he comes in and he looks at the last night's observing, which is all printed out on paper. That's the way computers used to work. Paper.

And he's going through these papers—remember paper? And he finds this big signal. And he writes with a magic marker, he writes "wow" next to it. So that's become known as the wow signal. Now, the big question was could this have been the aliens trying to get in touch with Ohio? And the answer is, we don't know the answer because that instrument automatically looked again 70 seconds later, a little over a minute later, and didn't find the signal.

People have continued to look for it. We've been looking for it. And we haven't found it either. So what do you conclude from that? It could be that the aliens broadcast once and then went on vacation. It could be. But you would never call that science. If you don't find it another time—We can't repeat it. So that's one.

And how about the Kepler object that had this weird eclipsing material in orbit around the host star? Yes, KIC 8462852. It kind of rolls off the tongue. Is that his phone number? We'll check it out later. Anyhow, this is a star that's quite far away actually. It's almost 1,500 light years away. That's pretty far for most stars.

And it is seen—Kepler measured its brightness over the course of years really. And you know, stars don't change their brightness very much. But this one suddenly dipped in brightness by more than a fifth, 22%. Very unusual. The sun never does that. Thank goodness. OK? It wasn't because there was a planet going in front of it. That would never dim it that much.

So the question is, what was it? And one suggestion, made maybe semi-seriously, was well, maybe there's a civilization there, and they built some astro-engineering project which is blocking some of the light. And they're taking that energy and feeding their planet with it. For example. They could be doing that so-called Dyson sphere.

Yeah, OK, so now, just keep it in the list here, a few months ago, Russians made an announcement of a radio signal that could represent intelligent life. Indeed, the Russians back in 2015 had used a big antenna down close to the Caucasus. It's called the RATAN-600. It's from the Soviet era. It has big women turning cranks and stuff like that. But it's a big antenna.

And they found a signal coming from the star HD 164595, another wonderfully named star. That star is known to have planets. And they thought, maybe this is it. But they didn't make any noise about it. They didn't tell people. And that's a strong indication that they themselves thought it might be interference. But somebody wrote a blog about this.

And so for a week, the media went nuts about this star. We tried to check out the signal. The Berkeley people tried to check out the signal. No signal. The Russians were forced to announce, look, we think it was a military satellite.