NEW SCIENTIST ⟩ How to see this year’s Geminid meteor shower?

I recently learned that the field of radio astronomy essentially began with a meteor shower. In December 1945, physicist Bernard Lovell was in Cheshire, UK, searching for cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are high-energy particles that travel through space. Lovell purchased a leftover radar detector from the British Army after World War II and installed it on a plot of land belonging to the Department of Botany at the University of Manchester.

The night Lovell chose to search for cosmic rays was December 14, the peak of the Geminid meteor shower. When he turned on the radar detector, he picked up a series of fleeting signals that turned out not to be cosmic rays, but meteors. He became the university’s first professor of radio astronomy, and the Jodrell Bank Observatory now occupies the same site.

2023-11-30 07:14:49
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