The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico is one of the most recognizable radio telescopes in the world, thanks to being prominently featured in such classic films as Contact, Independence Day, Armageddon, and Terminator Salvation, among others.
Far fewer people would recognize its namesake, the "father of radio astronomy": Karl Jansky.
Born in Oklahoma and raised in Wisconsin, Jansky was one of six children, and shared an early love of physics with his three brothers, as befitting the offspring of a professor of electrical engineering. He majored in physics at the University of Wisconsin, graduating despite the onset of chronic kidney disease midway through his studies.
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Bell Labs hired Jansky in 1928 to work on a research project involving short wave translatlantic radio communications -- specifically, to identify any sources of static likely to interfere with such communications.
Like many a scientist before him, he had to build his own equipment, in this case a special receiver, a recorder, and a large directional antenna mounted on a turntable. His colleagues dubbed the latter "Jansky's merry-go-round."
Then came months of tedious data collection, recording all kinds of static and analyzing those recordings to determine the sources. He narrowed it down to three types of static. For two types the sources were pretty obvious: it came from nearby and distant thunderstorms.
It was the third type of static -- "a very steady hiss" -- that Jansky found puzzling. At first he thought it was radiation from the sun, since the static rose and fell once a day. But the signal repeated every 23 hours and 56 minutes (instead of every 24 hours), and over several months, its brightest point shifted away from the sun.
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Jansky rightly concluded that the signal couldn't be coming from our solar system. In fact, it was emitting from the center of the Milky Way galaxy, within the constellation of Sagittarius. He published his findings in a series of three papers in 1933, making headlines in the New York Times on May 5, 1933.
The scientific community took a bit longer to notice. Even though Jansky very much wished to continue studying these strange static emissions by building a large dish antenna, Bell Labs remained focus on the original mission: developing transatlantic radio telephone service.
They had their answer -- static would not be a problem -- and reassigned Jansky to another project. It was in the midst of the Great Depression, after all, and financial resources were strained. The company couldn't afford to squandor those precious resources to satisfy one man's scientific curiosity.
Jansky never worked on radio astronomy again, but at least those three papers served as a master's thesis. The University of Wisconsin awarded him the degree in 1936. The following year, an engineer named Grote Reber built a radio telescope in his backyard and re-discovered the mysterious hissing. But the fledgling field didn't really take off until after World War II, when John Kraus founded a radio observatory at Ohio State University.
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These days, of course, radio astronomy is a staple of studying the heavens, and the Very Large Array has shed light on black holes, the protoplanetary disks around young stars, traced the swirling gases at the center of the Milky Way, and even discovered magnetic filaments, among other observations. (It's not the biggest one, though; that honor belongs to its sibling, the Very Long Baseline Array.)
It's still inspiring people, too, like Douglas Koke, a Colorado-based freelance graphic designer who shot "Signal to Noise," a nifty time-lapse video of the VLA enhanced with motion graphics. (h/t: Laughing Squid):
Signal To Noise from Douglas Koke on Vimeo.
Tags: Astronomy, History, Telescopes
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