The “Wow! Signal” was detected on August 15, 1977 as a strong narrowband radio signal by Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope. Its origin was inferred to be extraterrestrial. The latest natural explanation (accessible here) hypothesized that the “Wow! Signal” was caused by a sudden brightening of the hydrogen line emitted from an interstellar cloud, triggered by a strong transient radio source, such as a flare from a highly magnetized neutron star (magnetar).
The “Wow! Signal” originated from the sky coordinates of Right Ascension (RA)=19h25m=291 degrees and Declination (Dec)=-27 degrees.
On August 12, 1977, the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS was at a distance of about 600 times the Earth-Sun separation (AU) — corresponding to a light-travel time of about 3 days. It had the sky coordinates of RA=19h40m=295 degrees and Dec=-19 degrees. These parameters can be inferred accurately given the lack of non-gravitational acceleration for 3I/ATLAS, as inferred in my latest paper (accessible here).
Hence, the “Wow! Signal” was separated by approximately 4 degrees in RA and 8 degrees in Dec from the direction of 3I/ATLAS. The chance of two random directions in the sky being aligned to that level is about 0.6 percent. If the “Wow! Signal” originated from 3I/ATLAS, how powerful was the transmitter?
The detected intensity of the “Wow! Signal” was in the range of 54–212 Jansky with a bandwidth of about 10 kilohertz. At the distance of 600 AU, this corresponds to a source power of 0.5–2 gigawatts, the output of a typical nuclear reactor on Earth.
The “Wow! Signal” was observed at a frequency of 1420.4556±0.005 megahertz, blue-shifted by about 10 kilometers per second towards Earth relative to the central frequency of the hydrogen line. This blueshift is of the same order of magnitude but smaller than expected from the approach velocity of 3I/ATLAS towards the Sun, 60 kilometers per second.
Hellbound and Down 