Karl Jansky Biography

Karl Jansky was born in Norman, Oklahoma in 1905. He was named after physicist Karl Guthe whom his father worked under earlier on. This translated an interest in science and physics to Karl Jansky as his father taught Electrical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin. Jansky became a part of Bell labs in 1928 after graduating from University of Wisconsin and started his master's degree after undergraduate but never obtained it. 1929 Jansky began building an antenna to receive radio signals; it rotated and scanned the sky in twenty minutes. Jansky discovered three types of static: weak static from distant thunder storms, stronger static from local thunder storms, and persistent static. The last signal was thought to have unknown origins but eventually Jansky found that it comes from the center of the Milky Way, from all of the stars. His discovery was rather lucky because he scanned the sky during an 11 year period of low sunspot activity, otherwise the sun's radiation would overwhelm that of the other stars. Jansky's publications about star noise, also named "Star Noise" garnered him his Masters degree in 1936. During WWII, he worked on direction finders to locate German submarines. Jansky is considered the first person to discover the static signals that come from outer space and influenced future astronomers to develop more things that have to do with radio astronomy. Such future astronomers consist of Grote Reber who confirmed and expanded Jansky's discovery, growing the field of radio astronomy. Karl Jansky died on Valentine's Day, 1950 due to kidney failure caused by Bright's Disease. Jansky has a unit of measurement named after him, called the jansky, which is for radio-wave emission strength. Bell Labs have a monument dedicated to Jansky in 1998 at the New Jersey lab which he conducted his study. There is also a crater on the Moon called Jansky, in honor of him.