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That honour could be said to go to Karl Jansky (1905-1950). In 1932 he was working for the Bell Telephone labs on a project to identify possible sources of interference on shortwave radio links. While he was doing this he noticed a hiss in his radio receiver that would appear and peak once a day. His first thought was it was the Sun, however it kept sidereal time (that is it peaked 4 mins earlier each day), which suggested an astronomical source. He eventually identified the source as being in the constellation of Saggitarius. We now know that the radio hiss was coming from the centre of our galaxy. Bell were not interested in following up on his discovery so Jansky did not take it any further. But it was taken up by Grote Reber. He built a parabolic dish aerial, the sort most people associate with radio astronomy. Reber went on to create a radio map of the sky, so he was probably the first true radio astronomer.

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17y ago

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