Product Code Database
Grote Reber (December 22, 1911 – December 20, 2002) was an American pioneer of radio astronomy, which combined his interests in amateur radio and amateur astronomy. He was instrumental in investigating and extending Karl Jansky's pioneering work and conducted the first sky survey in the radio frequencies.
His 1937 radio antenna was the second ever to be used for astronomical purposes and the first parabolic reflecting antenna to be used as a radio telescope. Gerrit L. Verschuur, The invisible universe: the story of radio astronomy, p. 14 For nearly a decade he was the world's only radio astronomer.Wayne Orchiston, The New Astronomy: Opening the Electromagnetic Window and Expanding our View of Planet Earth: A Meeting to Honor Woody Sullivan on his 60th Birthday, Springer Science & Business Media – 2006, p. 63Robert Bless (1996), Discovering the Cosmos, University Science Books, p. 215
When he learned of Karl Jansky's work in 1933,[2] NYTimes for-pay article[3] John David North, Cosmos: an illustrated history of astronomy and cosmology. University of Chicago Press, 2008, p.661. [4] Kip S. Thorne (1994), Black holes and time warps: Einstein's outrageous legacy. W. W. Norton & Company, p. 324. he decided this was the field he wanted to work in, and applied to Bell Labs, where Jansky was working.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> NRAO Timeline (archived)
Reber's first receiver operated at 3300 MHz and failed to detect signals from outer space, as did his second, operating at 900 MHz. Finally, his third attempt, at 160 MHz, was successful in 1938, confirming Jansky's discovery. In 1940, he achieved his first professional publication, in the Astrophysical Journal, but Reber refused a research appointment with Yerkes Observatory.Thorne, p. 327. He turned his attention to making a radiofrequency sky map, which he completed in 1941 and extended in 1943. He published a considerable body of work during this era, and was the initiator of the "explosion" of radio astronomy in the immediate post-Second World War era. His data, published as contour maps showing the brightness of the sky in radio wavelengths, revealed the existence of radio sources such as Cygnus A and Cassiopeia A for the first time. For nearly a decade from 1937 on he was the world's only radio astronomer, a field that only expanded after World War Two when scientists, who had gained a great deal of knowledge during the wartime expansion of RADAR, entered the field, starting with Project Diana.
During this time he uncovered a mystery that was not explained until the 1950s. The standard theory of radio emissions from space was that they were due to black-body radiation, light (of which radio is a non-visible form) that is given off by all hot bodies. Using this theory one would expect that there would be considerably more high-energy light than low-energy, due to the presence of stars and other hot bodies. However Reber demonstrated that the reverse was true, and that there was a considerable amount of low-energy radio signal. It was not until the 1950s that synchrotron radiation was offered as an explanation for these measurements.
Reber sold his telescope to the National Bureau of Standards, and it was erected on a turntable at their field station in Sterling, Virginia. Eventually the telescope made its way to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia,Sullivan, W.T. (1984). The Early Years of Radio Astronomy. Cambridge University Press. p. 48 and Reber supervised its reconstruction at that site. Reber also helped with a reconstruction of Jansky's original telescope.
In the 1960s, he had an array of dipoles set up on the sheep grazing property of Dennistoun, about 7.5 km (5 miles) northeast of the town of Bothwell, Tasmania, where he lived in a house of his own design and construction he decided to build after he purchased a job lot of coach bolts at a local auction. He imported 4x8 douglas fir beams directly from a sawmill in Oregon, and then high technology double glazed window panes, also from the US. The bolts held the house together. The window panes formed a north facing passive passive solar, heating mat black painted, dimpled copper sheets, from which the warmed air rose by convection. The interior walls were lined with reflective rippled aluminium foil. The house was so well thermally insulated that the oven in the kitchen was nearly unusable because the heat from it, unable to escape, would raise the temperature of the room to over 50 °C (120 °F).
Reber was not a believer of the Big Bang theory; he believed that red shift was due to repeated absorption and re-emission or interaction of light and other electromagnetic radiations by low density dark matter, over intergalactic distances, and in 1977 he published an article called "Endless, Boundless, Stable Universe", which outlined his theory.Reber, G. (1977). Endless, Boundless, Stable Universe . Hobart, University of Tasmania (Occasional Papers, No. 9). Reber was supportive of the Tired light explanation for the redshift-distance relationship.Reber, G. (1982). A Timeless, Boundless, Equilibrium Universe. Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of Australia 4: 482–483.
He was looked after in his final days at the Ouse District Hospital, about 50 km (30 miles) northwest of Hobart, Tasmania, where he died in 2002, two days before his 91st birthday. His ashes are located at Bothwell Cemetery, just past New Norfolk in Tasmania and at many major radio observatories around the world:
|
|
