Trevor Collins

And I can tell there's no marketing fluff on that.

But they argue that if it was simply a radio signal coming to Earth and scintillating in some way, it was so strange that other dishes didn't pick up this very same signal.

It's very strange that just this one that was just trained on this one spot happened to pick it up.

It kind of implies that it was a focused signal specifically from a spot like an intentional burst, because if it was scintillating, something else would have passively picked this up.

In fact, talking about the very large array, it is way more sensitive than big ear.

And so if it happened to listen to the same signal, they would have been able to diagnose this a lot more easily.

But it doesn't answer for it.

It's a common theory.

It's a very light theory, but we're just getting started because the next one is where your instincts lied.

The idea of comets.

So in 2017, there was a man named Antonio Paris who proposed that comets could have been the potential source of this phenomenon.

Paris was an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at St.

Petersburg College in Florida.

While completing their research and studies, Paris and his colleagues learned that two comets, 266P Christensen and P2008Y2 Gibbs, again, named by brilliant scientists, not marketing, they would have passed through the detection area that Big Ear was recording in 1977.

So this is another, I'm going to pause for a second and recognize the mind-blowing nature of this, right?

To your point, we can roll back the clock knowing where Big Ear was aimed, knowing the trajectories of these comets in our solar system and be like, wait a minute, around that same time, these two comets were in the near the same spot in the night sky.

Maybe they did it.

Maybe one of them caused this signal in some way.

So they explained that the signal could have come from a hydrogen cloud that was either around one of the comets or maybe potentially between the two comets.

And Paris and his team then tried to recreate this phenomenon because, of course, comets come back around.