Radio Telescope

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Karl Jansky was not looking for the universe. In 1932, as a young engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, he was tracking down the sources of static that kept interrupting transatlantic radio-telephone calls, using a rotatable antenna array built on a turntable salvaged from a Model T Ford, nicknamed Jansky's merry-go-round. Most of the noise he found had ordinary explanations, thunderstorms near and far, but one faint hiss shifted its position in the sky by about four minutes a day, the signature not of the 24-hour solar day but of the slightly shorter sidereal day the stars keep. Jansky traced it to the direction of Sagittarius, toward the center of the Milky Way. Bell Labs, satisfied that the interference was harmless and unrelated to its business, moved him to other work, and Jansky never followed up. It was Grote Reber, a radio engineer in Illinois who read Jansky's 1933 paper and could find no one else interested in pursuing it, who built the first instrument designed from scratch to do what Jansky had done by accident, a 9-meter parabolic dish, built in his own backyard in Wheaton in 1937, aimed at the sky by hand. For most of the next decade Reber was, by his own account, the only person on Earth actively practicing radio astronomy, and the maps he published of radio emission across the sky gave the new field its first data beyond Jansky's single accidental discovery.