Beating Books: The first person to listen to the birth of a star

As an effort 10,000-plus the people who made and assembled James Webb Space Telescope For all the evidence, the years of independent science are over and true. Newton, Galileo, Keppler, and Copernicus all altered the human understanding of our environment in the universe, and they did so on their own, but with the help of this work in the Victorian era, this astronomical experience of homebrewing. all rare.

In his new book, The Invisible World: Why There Is More Truth Than The Eye, Astronomer Matthew Bothwell of Cambridge University astronomer tells the story of how we came to find the universe, which was previously invisible to human eyes. In the section below, Bothwell recounts the actions of Grote Reber, one of the world’s first (and temporarily, only) astronomers.

Release by permission from The Invisible Universe by Matthew Bothwell (One country 2021).

The Only Radio in the World

It is a little strange to look back at how the celestial body did Jansky’s Results. Looking back, we can see that astronomy was about to change with the dramatic changes that began with the telescope of Galileo. Recognizing radio waves from space is the first time in history for people to look at the vast invisible universe, hiding behind a narrow window of visible form. It was an amazing event that has not been overlooked in astronomical groups for one simple reason: the world of radio engineering was far removed from the cosmos. When Jansky published his first results he tried to link the split, destroying half of the paper and causing his readers to be confused in space (explaining how to test the position of celestial bodies, and why the sign repeats every twenty-thirty hours. And sixty-six minutes one means something interesting). But, in the end, the two studies suffered from a lack of communication. These experts speak the language of vacuum tubes, amplifiers and antenna voltages: a mystery to scientists who are widely used to talk about stars, galaxies and planets. As Princeton astronomer Melvin Skellett later put it:

Astronomers said ‘Gee is fun – you mean there are radio objects that come from the stars?’ I said, ‘Well, that’s what it looks like’. ‘So much fun.’ And that’s all they had to say about it. Anything from Bell Labs was to be believed, but they did not see its use or any reason for further research. It was so far from his view of the heavens that there was no real interest.

After Jansky moved on to other challenges, there was only one person who enjoyed listening to the radio waves from the air. For nearly a decade, from the mid-1930’s to the mid-1940’s, Grote Reber was the world’s largest radio astronomer.

Big Reber’s This subject is unique in all the science of the twentieth century. He alone devised a whole field of science, taking on the task of building weapons, overseeing, and researching the theory of his discoveries. What makes him special is that he did it all as a complete child, working on his own outside of science. His work as a transmitter of radio transmitters had given him the ability to design his own telescope. His interest in scientific literature led him to agree with Jansky’s findings on cosmic staticism, and when it became clear that no one on earth seemed to care more about him, he took it upon himself to become part of the radio universe. He built his telescope in his backyard in Chicago using the tools and equipment available to everyone. His telescope, about ten meters across, was the talk of the neighborhood (for good reason – it looks like a doomsday photography device). His mother used it to dry his laundry.

He spent many years looking up at the sky with his home-made machine. He stared at his telescope all night, every night, while still in his day’s work (apparently sleeping for several hours in the evening after work, and in the early hours of the morning after the telescope). Realizing that he did not know enough about physics and astronomy to understand what he was seeing, he studied at a local university. Over the years, what he saw painted a beautiful picture of the sky as he could see with the eyes of a radio. He observed the sweeping of our Milky Way, with bright spots between galaxies (where Jansky carried his star), as well as the constellations Cygnus and Cassiopeia. By this time he had studied enough physics to provide scientific support, too. He knew that if the whistle from the Milky Way was blown by hot air – the heat of the stars or hot air – then it would be very strong at short distances. Since Reber was taking waves much shorter than Jansky’s (60 cm, compared to Jansky’s 15-meter waves), Reber must have been shot by the invisible waves of tens of thousands of times more powerful than anything Jansky saw. But he wasn’t. Reber had enough confidence in his equipment to say that whatever makes the radio waves, must be ‘heat-free’ – that is, it was something different from the radiation of the ‘hot things’ we discussed in Chapter 2. He also gave the answer (correct! ): that the hot electrons between the stars passing through the ions – a well-charged atom – will be blown around like a Formula 1 car heading into a tight corner. The intersection electron will emit radio waves, and the multi-billion dollar result of these events is what Reber realizes from his backyard. This only happens in hot air clouds. Reber was, carrying radio waves emitted by clouds with new stars scattered throughout our Galaxy. He was, in fact, listening to the rising stars. It was a noise he had never heard before. To this day, radio broadcasts are used to study the formation of stars, from the tiny clouds in our Milky Way to the birth of galaxies in the farthest corners of the Universe.

In many ways, Reber’s story seems to be inconsistent. The best time for independent scientists, who were able to make their own discoveries by working alone with their own tools, was hundreds of years ago. With the Victorian era, science became more complex, more expensive, and above all professional business. Grote Reber is, as far as I know, the ultimate amateur ‘foreign’ scientist; the last man who had no science education, built his equipment in his field, and through hard work and carelessness he was able to change the world of science.