The Wow! Signal Podcast
The Wow!Signal Podcast examines a wide range of issues from a scientific perspective through the lens of the search for intelligent life from other worlds.
Episodes
We welcome back Professor Abel Mendez from the University of Puerto Rico to tell us about recent research into data from the Arecibo radio telescope focused on cold hydrogen clouds and a proposed natural explanation for the Big Ear Wow! Signal that we covered in depth in Episode 19.
We recommend you download the draft pap...
Interview recorded: 11 July 2021
Released: 16 July 2021
Duration: 21 minutes, 33 seconds
Beatriz Villarroel discusses her latest VASCO paper in Nature Scientific Reports, "Exploring nine simultaneously occurring transients on April 12th 1950."
Links:
Villarroel+ , Exploring Nine simultaneously occurring transi...
Released: 4 February 2021 
Duration: 58 minutes 44 seconds
Co-hosts Paul Carr and Daniela DePaulis are joined by author Thomas Moynihan. The subject is the idea of human extinction and how it evolved into our present day understand of Existential Risk.
...
Released: 28 November 2020
Duration: 70 minutes, 39 seconds
Co-hosts Paul Carr and Daniela De Paulis engage philosopher Chelsea Haramia on the ethics of sending signals into space that might be received by intelligent beings in the cosmos.
For ...
Released: 7 November 2020
Duration: 57 minutes, 36 seconds
Co hosts Paul Carr and Daniela De Paulis welcome space historian David Skogerboe to talk about the pro-space activism of Arthur C. Clarke.
Guest Bio:
David Skogerboe is a space historian and science communicator. He rec...
Released: 6 April 2020
Duration: 53 minutes, 55 seconds
Author and podcaster Wade Roush talks about his forthcoming book from MIT Press, Extraterrestrials. The book covers astrobiology, SETI, the Fermi paradox and more for a literate but non-specialist audience.
WADE ROU...
Released: 31 March 2020
Duration: 54 minutes, 8 seconds
Co-hosts Paul Carr and Daniela DePaulis welcome Dr. Paola Castaño to talk about her research among the science teams working on the International Space Station.
For more information, please visit our blog at https://wowsignalpodcast.com
Gu...
Released: 20 March 2020
Duration: 31 minutes, 42 seconds
Astronomer David Blank responded to our invitation to comment on the Villarroel+ paper we covered in Episode 41, which he describes as "very fascinating."
Links
Dorrit Hoffleit and her autobiography: Misfortunes as Blessings in Disguise
Released: 22 January 2020
Live recording: 20 January 2020
Duration: 66 minutes 45 seconds
Thread: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Host Paul Carr along with Daniela De Paulis and Ciro Villa welcome astronomer Stella Kafka, director of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO). We talk about the recent and possibly unprecedented dimming of Betelgeuse, among many other astronomy topics.
Released:
Duration: 55 minutes, 36 seconds
Adam Dipert is a veteran circus performer and dancer who recently received his PhD in physics from Arizona State University. Her has brought his various interests together by researching human movement in microgravity. We are going to let him tell you all about that.
Released: 11 December 2019
Duration: 48 minutes, 30 seconds
Co-hosts Daniela DePaulis and Paul Carr welcome Julia DeMarines (@LifeNSpace) to talk about bouncing radio signals off the moon. Julia is involved in a moon bounce research project for Berkeley SETI, and Daniela has used moonbounce in her art projects, including Cogito.
We also get into a discussion of METI, and the importance of message composition to humans.
Released: 15 November 2019
Duration: 42 minutes, 24 seconds
Our guest on Burst 19 in 2016, Dr. Beatriz Villarroel, returns to give us an update on the vanishing star, following the release of a new paper detailing a much more ambitious project along the same lines that finds a number of new candidate objects.
For more information, please visit https://wowsignalpodcast.com
Links:
Released: 16 October 2019
Duration: 54 minutes, 51 seconds
Interstellar Languages is a forthcoming book about the human quest to craft messages that can be understood across interstellar distances. We may want to tell ET about ourselves, or it may be help ET send message to us that we will know how to interpret.
Released: 29 September 2019
Duration: 49 minutes, 52 seconds
Download Sofia's paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.02683
A conversation with SETI researcher Sofia Sheikh about how we 
should evaluate technosignature search strategies. We cover three examples of techn...
Released: 18 February 2019
Duration: 6 minutes, 48 seconds
Paul Carr summarizes why we want to know more about this star, and how you can get involved.
Links:
Please see wowsignalpodcast.com for the most detailed information.
The Most Mysterious Star in the Universe (Tabby's TED Talk)
Tabby's Star for the Perplexed, Part 1
The Slow and Fast Dimming of Tabby's Star (Brad Schaefer)
Ben Montet Makes a Star Weirder
Released: 10 February 2019
Duration: 16 Minutes, 51 Seconds
Abraham Loeb and Shmuel Bialy kicked up a kerfuffle when they wrote a paper suggesting that one possible explanation for ‘Oumuamua was that it could be an artificial object, in other words, an alien spacecraft—specifically, a lightsail. The two have been praised for their boldness and condemned for their recklessness, but little has been said concerning the possibility o...
A not quite so short announcement from the producer of the Unseen Podcast and the Wow! Signal. This is for those who have not seen the video.
Released: 24 April 2018
Duration: 10 minutes, 1 second
Paul Carr talks about today's much more accurate distance estimate to Boyajian's Star from Gaia Data Release 2, and what, if anything, this rules out.
Links:
Clemens+ (2018) - Proper Motion of the Faint Star near KIC 8462852 (Boyajian's Star) - Not a Binary System
Boyajian+ (2015) - Where's the Flux?
Released: 23 April 2018
Duration:12 minutes, 21 seconds
Paul Carr reviews what has been happening over the Winter and early Spring with respect to Boyajian's Star. We review the Winter observations, the Castelaz and Barker paper, and the two surprise March dips, Caral-Supe and Evangeline. We also talk about the upcoming Gaia Data Release 2 and what it might mean.
Links
Released: 6 February 2018
Duration: 24 minutes, 48 seconds
A hundred years ago cosmologists were struggling to understand the nature and structure of the universe, and at the heart of this struggle was the island universe hypothesis. Today we find ourselves confro...
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