Sound of Massed Stars Heard by Radio

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18253, 23 November 1933, Page 9

Sound of Massed Stars Heard by Radio

TllE stars massed in the southern A skies last night made a sizzling sound —like bacon in a frying pan — which was picked up by radio here. The sound was broadcast to a meeting of the New York Electrical Society and the Amateur Astronomers' Association by Mr. Karl G. Jansky, ot the Bell Laboratories, who lias been tuning in on it for two years tit Holm* dahl. S.J. The source of these radio waves was from the constellation .Sagittarius, the Archer, in the Milky Way, about midway between the southern horizon and the" zenith. In lesser volume they came from other parts of the Milky Way. .Behind Sagittarius lies a mass ol stars 4U,000 light years away from the earth, visible only in telescopes. These stars are thought to bo the source of most of the sizzling, a short radio wave slightly under fifty feet long. They arc the centre of the Milky Way, with a gravitational pull so immense that around them, like a cartwheel, revolve nearly 30,900,000,0UU otner stars.

The earth and the solar system lie in this cartwheel about two-thirds of the way towards the rim. The waves heard last night travel with the speed of light and are believed to have started 40,000 years ago from this hub of the universe.

What causes them, Mr. Jansky said, is not known. They could not be, no said, radiations from ordinary stars like the sun, because none of them seem to come from the sun, despite its nearness. They might be, lie hazarded, rays from young stars which are boiling with energy far in excess of the sun's.

Mr. Jansky said ho is making now rccoivets which will be turned towards the stars in .search for shorter wave lengths. He explained that those radio signals might be the original waves from stars piercing the earth v atmosphere, or that they could also bo waves set up in the earth’s own atmosphere, by the bombardment of primary radio waves coming from distant space.