The first radio astronomer did not mean to be the first radio astronomer. In 1933, a man named Karl Jansky was working on a project for Bell Laboratories, a lab in New Jersey named after Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone. Engineers there were developing the first phone system that worked across the Atlantic Ocean. When people first tried making phone calls on that system, they heard a hissing sound in the background at certain times of the day. Bell Labs thought that noise was bad for business, so they sent Karl Jansky to find out what was causing it. He soon noticed that the hiss began when the middle of our galaxy rose in the sky and ended when it set (everything in the sky rises and sets just like the Sun and Moon do). He figured out that radio waves coming from the center of the galaxy were messing up the phone connection and causing the hiss. He – and the phone – had detected radio waves from space. Jansky opened up a new, invisible universe.

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