Galactic Hiss

Owners of fine radio receivers understand the clangor of nearby thunderstorms and the clatter of distant ones. But a third kind of static, a soft hissing, las been unexplained until last week. Karl Guthe Jansky of Bell Telephone Laboratories announced that hissing static comes from the Milky Way.

After studying the hiss for a year, Researcher Jansky determined that it was the effect of a 14.6-metre wave at a frequency of about 20 million cycles a second. If. like thunderstorms and street cars, the source of the static is terrestrial, the hiss should have the same intensity all year round. But it varies with the hours of the day and the seasons of the year, as if Earth periodically gets between the radio receiver and an extra-terrestrial source of the hiss. In this variation the Jansky waves differ from Dr. Millikan's cosmic rays and Dr. Vesto Melvin Slipher's cosmic radiation (TIME. May 1). Directional studies show that the hiss must originate near the point in the Milky Way toward which the Sun is rushing Earth and the other planets. Researcher Jansky left it to the astrophysicists to say what caused his new galactic waves.

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