A Brief History of Radio Astronomy

[Rick]

Stars on Radio

Stars and certain other astronomical objects generate light. When we look up on a clear night, we can see many thousands of stars, and a handful of other things.

But light only holds a special place in the electromagnetic spectrum because we can detect it with our eyes. The things in the sky above us are not so parochial. They shine in the ultraviolet and the infrared. Some things out there produce x-rays or gamma rays. Some of them broadcast radio waves.

In the early 1930s, Karl Jansky was an engineer with Bell Labs in the USA. His job was looking after the early short wave radio transmitters and receivers that had been set up to communicate across the Atlantic. In particular, he was trying to figure out what was causing some annoying static interference with the signals. Some of it was in short bursts that Jansky discovered were being caused by ...

Read the rest at http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/3220.html

[Rick]

More Stars on the Radio

In 1965, Susan Jocelyn Bell began her doctorate studies in physics. Her supervisor was Antony Hewish of the Cavendish Physics Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Hewish, together with Martin Ryle, had built the world's first radio interferometer telescope in the years following World War II ...

The story continues at http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/3224.html