The Bruce Medalists
||Photo courtesy National Radio Astronomy Observatory
|22 December 1911
||1962 Bruce Medalist
||20 December 2002
Grote Reber, a young engineering graduate of what is now the Illinois
The Bruce Medalists
||Photo courtesy National Radio Astronomy Observatory
|22 December 1911
||1962 Bruce Medalist
||20 December 2002
Grote Reber, a young engineering graduate of what is now the Illinois Institute of Technology working as a radio engineer in Chicago, was the first to follow up Karl Jansky’s 1933 announcement of the discovery of radio waves from space. Devoting nights and weekends to his hobby Reber constructed a 9-meter dish antenna in his back yard in suburban Wheaton, Illinois and built three different detectors before finding signals at a frequency of 160 megahertz in 1939. His 1940 and 1944 publications of articles titled “Cosmic Static” in the Astrophysical Journal marked the beginning of intentional radio astronomy. He was the first to express received radio signals in terms of flux density and brightness, first to find evidence that galactic radiation is non-thermal, and first to produce radio maps of the sky. Later, after four years at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST), he went off on his own and pioneered in very long-wavelength radio astronomy, working in Tasmania, where the ionosphere is relatively transparent to such radiation. Reber was the second astronomer (after William Huggins) to be awarded the Bruce medal for work performed as an amateur. Reber remained a loner and essentially an amateur all his life. For his unconventional views on cosmology see his paper, “A Timeless, Boundless Equilibrium Universe.
Presentation of Bruce medal
Nicholson, Seth B., PASP 74, 183-86 (1962).
American Astronomical Society, Henry Norris Russell Lectureship, 1962.
Franklin Institute, Elliot Cresson medal, 1963.
National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Jansky Prize, 1975.
Royal Astronomical Society, Jackson-Gwilt Medal, 1983, presented by M.J. Rycroft, Observatory 103