@cosmos4u I think you know as much as I do here. That paper (the one I linked on Twitter) isn’t the first place I read about it, but I can’t recall where I originally saw this version of events. Any luck with ref [3] in that paper?

@failedLyndonLaRouchite That's great.

It's pretty remarkable, the sheer volume of stuff we've learned about the Universe by pointing different sorts of antenna at the sky and asking “Huh, what's that noise?"

Many years later, at a ceremony dedicating a sculpture at the site of the original antenna, Jansky’s sister remarked that his persistence probably came from their father always telling them as children to "question everything."

Pretty big impact for a little star noise.

Jansky wanted to build a big radio dish to refine his observations, but his bosses at Bell felt like they already had the answers they needed. After all, they were just looking for the source of radio static that was impacting trans-Atlantic phone calls.

The investigation was closed, and Jansky moved on to other projects. He passed away in 1950 at the young age of 44.

Jansky published “Electrical disturbances apparently of extraterrestrial origin” the following year.

http://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1933PA.....41..548J/abstract

But the source seemed to have moved after a few months, and the fact that it didn't diminish during the eclipse conclusively ruled out the sun.

Instead, the source appeared to be in Sagittarius, and its peaks were timed with the sidereal period of 23 hours and 56 minutes.

This led Jansky to conclude that the source must be near the center of the Milky Way, which Jan Oort had pinpointed just 5 years earlier.

Jansky was working for Bell Labs at the time, trying to identify radio static that interfered with trans-Atlantic telephone transmissions. He noted three different kinds of noise. The first two were related to nearby and distant storms.

Jansky built the antenna pictured above to measure this radio static. He called it his “merry-go-round” because it could rotate on a set of Model-T wheels. Using the antenna he initially found that the third source of radio hiss seemed to be coming from the sun.

Karl Jansky invented the field of radio astronomy #OTD in 1932.

During a solar eclipse he saw no change in the faint radio hiss he'd been monitoring, which ruled out the sun as a source. He soon attributed this "star noise" to large ionized gas clouds near the center of the Milky Way.

Guion Stewart Bluford Jr. became the first Black American astronaut to travel into space #OTD in 1983, on the Orbiter Challenger as part of mission STS-8.

Image: NASA

The cover of today’s Daily Tar Heel, the UNC student newspaper.

Faraday's ring-coil apparatus is on display at the Royal Institution's Faraday museum. They also have his notebooks.

Here is the page from August 29, 1831, where he describes the construction of his apparatus.

Ref: The Royal Institution, RI MS F_2_C

Michael Faraday first demonstrated the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction #OTD in 1831.

He coiled insulated wire around two sides of an iron ring, then observed a brief current in one as he connected the other to a battery.

Image: The Royal Institution, Paul Wilkinson

@GatekeepKen No. NC is full of good people who don’t want this, whose vote has been gerrymandered into irrelevancy.

@faiz It’s just a script with the right signals and keywords, nothing more.

Thom Tillis has received nearly $6 million from the NRA. The NRA owns his vote.

If he was really serious about this, he’d stop taking their checks.

@DamonWakes in a sense, it really is the greatest possible fart joke

@jby@ecoevo.socialI I know it stands for “Molecular Ecologist” but it still reads like an ecologist who is also a mole.

I encourage you to take a minute and read this obituary written by her family. Lee Russell's experience fleeing her home to escape Nazis, then witnessing the rise of fascism across Europe, inspired her commitment civic engagement.

https://www.mottmckameyfh.com/obituaries/Liane-Russell

Liane Russell passed away in 2019, at the age of 95, from pneumonia – a complication of treatments for lung cancer. She was involved in conservation work right up until she entered the hospital.

The American Museum of Science & Energy in Oak Ridge has a small display about Liane Russell and her work at ORNL. She posed next to it for a photo in December of 2018. That photo and a note of appreciation she sent to the museum are now part of the display.