Jansky, Karl

With good luck and serendipity acting in full force, a new window was opened to the universe in the early 1930s by a physicist at Bell Lahs, Karl Jansky. Bell Labs was part of AT T. AT T had... 

The jansky, a unit of radio power flux used in radio astronomy, was named for Karl G. Jansky, who is first credited with discovering extraterrestrial radio signals. 

Radio astronomy (Karl G. Jansky) One of the founders of the field of radio astronomy, Janksy detects radio static coming from the Milky Way s center. 

Karl Jansky worked for Bell Labs, and around 1930 he built an antenna to investigate radiation that could cause interference in radio communications. Over a period of months, he tracked down the origin of one mysterious source of static that appeared at regular intervals, rising and falling over the course of the day. After many measurements, he realized that the time period of the static was 4 minutes less than 24 hours, roughly 364/365 of a day. This interval is the same period of time it takes for Earth to rotate exactly once in relation to the stars. The source of the interference was the center of the Milky Way, in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. 

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