Physics Department

Radio Telescope

It was Einstein who made the real trouble. He announced in 1905 that there was no such thing as absolute rest. After that there never was.

-- Steven Leacock

         The field of radio astronomy was first stumbled upon by Karl G Jansky.  He was working at Bell Telephone laboratories in 1932 attempting to find a way to reduce static in telephone lines generated by thunderstorms and lightning.  He did find what he was looking for but he also found that there was still static even after the storms were compensated for.  This second interference source seemed to be present 24 hours a day, and was not associated with anything man-made.  So, this eventually led him to the assumption that the signal was not originating on earth at all, instead, the signal seemed to be coming from someplace other than our own solar system.  In fact, the radiation he was detecting was coming from the direction of the center of the galaxy.  This was the first recognized detection of radio emission from sources other than earth.

            “Microwave radiation due to transitions between the hyperfine components of atomic hydrogen in interstellar space was first detected by Ewen and Purcell and independently by Muller and Oort”(Townes and Schawlow, 146).  The region is at 1420.405 MHz and corresponds to a wavelength of 21.11 cm.