However, as Caballero pointed out in his study, 2MASS 19281982-2640123 wasn’t the only possible source of the WOW! signal. He highlighted another 66 stars in roughly the same direction as strong potential candidates.
Caballero tells Astronomy that the recent radio telescope observations of 2MASS 19281982-2640123 were exactly what he’d hoped for when he carried out his initial study. “It was very exciting to learn that the SETI community heard me and took action,” he says. “That was the main goal of my paper.”
Caballero also says that the Breakthrough Listen search was “exhaustive,” meaning that although it only lasted a few hours, it has effectively ruled out 2MASS 19281982-2640123 as the source of the WOW! signal.
Future searches, Caballero adds, might be well advised to first determine if there are any potentially habitable planets orbiting candidate stars that might be the source of the WOW! signal. If so, then researchers could opt to carry out radio observations of those star systems first.
Could the WOW! signal have come from near Earth?
There’s also the chance that the WOW! signal didn’t originate around a distant star at all. For instance, perhaps the signal was so strong because it came from something much closer to Earth.
In 2016, astrophysicist Antonio Paris of St. Petersburg College in Florida proposed that the WOW! signal could have come from comet 266P/Christensen, which hadn’t been catalogued at the time. This idea doesn’t hold water to some scientists, including Farah. But Paris tells Astronomy he stands by his theory that the WOW! signal might have been caused by a comet, or that it was a one-time burst of cosmic radiation.
But either way, he says he’s just excited that people are still trying to figure it out.
“It’s great to see others are attempting to solve one of the greatest puzzles in astronomical history,” he says. “The search for the elusive Wow! signal continues!”
