jansky

Definitions

Examples

• He improved upon Jansky’s antenna — a bunch of metal tubes held up by a pivoting wooden trestle — and fashioned a parabolic metal dish for focusing incoming radio waves to a point, where an amplifier boosted the feeble signal.

• Jansky’s discovery was mostly met with mild curiosity by the astronomy community.

• In fact, the very first radio astronomy experiment can be traced back before Jansky to August of 1924, when Mars made its closest pass to Earth in nearly a century.

• Ironically, Jansky’s original goal — to filter out natural sources of radio waves and make way for communication technology — is now reversed for radio astronomers trying to study the universe in the age of modern electronics.

• His efforts were wildly successful, reproducing Jansky’s observations and then creating the first radio map of the sky.

• Later observers, for example Jansky and Moss, established four groups.