If the Universe Has 400 Billion Stars — Maybe We Heard One For 72 Seconds.

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]headlines as a possible alien transmission.

[00:00:03]The Wow! signal was the frame everyone reached for. It was the thing people compared it to.

[00:00:09]Jerry Ehman himself was careful. He never claimed the signal was extraterrestrial. He said it was consistent with an extraterrestrial origin.

[00:00:17]>> [snorts] >> He spent the rest of his career explaining precisely what the data showed and what it didn't prove.

[00:00:24]"I am still waiting," he said in a 2010 interview, "for someone to find a natural explanation that fully accounts for what we recorded." He died in 2024.

[00:00:34]The signal remains unexplained. The Milky Way contains between 200 and 400 billion stars.

[00:00:40]Astronomers now know that most of those stars have planets. The number of Earth-size planets in habitable zones close enough to their star for liquid water is estimated in the billions.

[00:00:51]The universe has been around for 13.8 billion years.