Who invented the radio telescope?
Radio Telescopes were officially discovered and invented by Karl
G. Jansky in 1931. His radio telescope was a series of arms that
spun around with the intention of detecting radio frequency
interference during a thunder storm. However, as time progressed he
realized that his "radio telescope" was detecting static which he
could not account for. He also discovered that each day the static
peaked four minutes earlier, ruling out his original explanation as
the source being the sun. Astronomers refer to a stellar day (which
is typically four minutes shorter than a solar day) as a sidereal
day. Not being an astronomer himself, it took Jansky a while to
surmise that the source of his static was in fact of
Extraterrestrial origin. With further study he discovered the
source to be the milky way galaxy and in 1933 published his
findings in a scientific journal. However his research was largely
ignored by the scientific community until in 1937 when Grobe Reber
picked up where Jansky left off and built the prototype of what we
now know to be a radio telescope in his back yard in Wheaton,
Illinois. At first he began looking for radio waves at shorter
wavelengths, with little to no success. He later increased his
target wavelengths to 1.87 meters where he located strong radio
emissions along the Milky Way. Reber continued his research up
until 1944, when he published his own scientific findings. Despite
this, it wasn't until after World War 2 that Radio Waves were
explored in depth, since the Allies had discovered radio
interference from the sun on their radars.