When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way. (opens in new tab)

In the summer of 1932, a radio engineer named Karl Jansky was standing in a field in New Jersey, next to a contraption his colleagues had nicknamed Jansky’s merry-go-round — a lattice of brass pipes and wooden beams mounted on wheels from an old automobile, rotating slowly on a circular track. Bell Telephone Laboratories had […]