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radio astronomy

The Mysterious Hiss from the Milky Way

July 22, 2017 by Brian Ventrudo Filed Under: Science

The northern summer Milky Way. The center of our galaxy lies just above the tree at lower center in this image. The Bell Labs radio engineer Karl Jansky discovered radio emissions from this location in the early 1930s. Image credit: Brian Ventrudo/CosmicPursuits.com.

In the early 1930′s, Bell Labs, the research division of AT&T, launched a project to use radio “short waves” to transmit telephone calls across the Atlantic. The technology to transmit signals via short waves was reasonably well understood. But engineers also needed to understand sources of noise that might interfere with radio communications signals. So the powers-that-were at Bell Labs tasked a young engineer to find sources of radio static that might interfere with transmissions. During his work, this young engineer, Karl Jansky, made an accidental discovery that revolutionized astronomy [Read more…] about The Mysterious Hiss from the Milky Way

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Filed Under: Science milky way, radio astronomy, science

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