Content area
Full text
Twice this century, scientists working at the same research center made entirely serendipitous discoveries that changed astronomy forever.
In the early 1930s, Karl G. Jansky, a young Bell Labs radio engineer, went searching for the source of interference that had been plaguing transatlantic telephone service. At the Holmdel, New Jersey, facility, he constructed an aerial antenna array that measured thirteen feet high and one hundred feet long, attached it to four wheels from a Model T Ford mounted on a circular track, and set the entire contraption rotating.
Jansky could easily attribute two types of noise to local and distant weather patterns. The source of a third, however, proved more elusive. From charts that translated the noise into ink graphs, he concluded that the heaviest concentration of "weak, hiss-type static" traveled a full circuit of the sky in twenty-three hours, fifty-six minutes-or precisely the length of a sidereal day (the time it takes the stars to complete one revolution in the heavens). This peak signal seemed to be emanating from the vicinity of the constellation Sagittarius, toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
The source, Jansky concluded, was the stars, which would explain why the noise never went away: the stars themselves never really go away.
This was the first time ever that a "telescope" had picked up radio signals from space, and Jansky's discovery...