From the depths of space—too deep to be reached by astronomers’ light-telescopes—mysterious bodies continually bombard the earth with radio waves. No one knows much about these tuneless, codeless, cosmic broadcasts, but the National Bureau of Standards hopes to find out more. Last week, at Sterling, Va., 40 miles from Washington, Standards was building a radio observatory to study the waves and their origin. In charge of the observatory is young (35) Grote Reber, who broke into radio astronomy by developing a hobby.
Reber read about the sky waves some ten years ago while he was working as a radio engineer in Wheaton, Ill. To eavesdrop on the stars, he built a radio “telescope” in his backyard. It was mostly a saucer-shaped receiver of sheet metal, 31 ft. in diameter.
With his homemade apparatus, Reber made a radio map of the sky. Strong broadcasts, he found, come from the Milky Way (the crowded inner section of the galaxy or star-cloud in which the sun is one star). Most galaxies have a dense central nucleus, but the nucleus of the Milky Way galaxy (if one exists) is hidden by clouds of dust which block its light. . Reber turned his radio telescope on the place where the nucleus ought to be, and got a “bulge” of powerful radio energy. The nucleus does exist, he concluded, and is sending radio waves right on through the dust.
Other parts of the sky are broadcasting strongly, too. In one area, where only faint stars can be seen, Reber found an invisible something which “shines very brightly in the radio region.” He does not know yet what it is.
In his new Government-financed observatory, Reber will have a fine new “telescope,” made partly from captured German radar and specially designed for studying radio waves from the sun. (The Bureau of Standards has to be more or less practical with taxpayers’ money; the practical project at the moment is a study of how solar waves affect radio transmission on the earth.) But Reber also intends to refine his own homemade apparatus and search the sky for more mysterious “somethings.” Perhaps, in time, he can figure out what—and why—they are.
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