science · 14 February 1950 · 75 years ago
death
Died 14 Feb 1950 at age 44 (born 22 Oct 1905).
Karl Guthe Jansky was an American electrical engineer who discovered cosmic radio emissions in 1932. At Bell Laboratories in NJ, Jansky was tracking down the crackling static noises that plagued overseas telephone reception. He found certain radio waves came from a specific region on the sky every 23 hours and 56 minutes, from the direction of Sagittarius toward the center of the Milky Way. In the publication of his results, he suggested that the radio emission was somehow connected to the Milky Way and that it originated not from stars but from ionized interstellar gas. At the age of 26, Jansky had made a historic discovery - that celestial bodies could emit radio waves as well as light waves.
OnThisDay.net