Engineer’s find made noise

On this day 77 years ago, a young engineer from Oklahoma announced a discovery that would change astronomy more than anything since Galileo pointed his first crude telescope toward the heavens 400 years ago.

Bell Labs was on the verge of worldwide wireless communication using radio waves. They needed to know what possible sources of interference existed because the technology was so expensive. The first New York-to-London radio telephone service, initiated in 1927, cost $75 a minute! They assigned a young radio engineer named Karl Jansky, born in Oklahoma Territory, the son of the dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma, to study the problem.

Along with natural sources, mostly thunderstorms, and manmade ones from vehicle ignitions, electrical appliances and electrical transmission lines, Jansky found "a steady hiss type of static from unknown origin. ... A very steady continuous interference — the term ‘static’ doesn’t quite fit it.” He noticed that it varied with a 23-hour, 56-minute periodicity, which meant it had to come from space.

Due to Earth’s daily rotation and annual orbit, celestial objects rise four minutes earlier from day to day. He eventually realized that the source was the center of the Milky Way, and he made the first crude radio map of the galactic center, including what eventually would prove to be a massive black hole at the core of our galaxy.

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