Quarter Four Astronomy Biography
Grote Reber was born on December 22nd, 1911 in Chicago, Illinois. His father was Schuyler Colefax Reber and he owned a canning factory. His mother was Harriet Grote Reber and he had a younger brother named Schuyler Reber. His mother was a school teacher before marrying and she taught Edwin Hubble 7th and 8th grade science. Grote Reber attended Wheaton High School in Wheaton, Illinois. He then went to the BS Electrical Engineering University and the Illinois Institute of Technology. He graduated in 1933 with a degree in electrical engineering.
He was an amateur radio operator and worked for many radio manufacturers in Chicago from 1933 to 1947. He operated a ham radio station in his spare time. He learned of Karl Jansky’s work in 1933 regarding his discovery of radio waves from the Galaxy. This prompted him to teach himself astronomy after deciding this was the field he wanted to work in. He applied to Bell Labs, where Jansky was working, but this was during the peak of the Great Depression and there were no jobs available. In 1937 he constructed the world’s first radio telescope. It was made mostly out of sheet metal and was a 31-ft parabolic transit dish powered by an extension cord to his back yard. Until the end of World War II, he remained the world’s only radio astronomer. In 1938, his device picked up radio emissions from the Milky Way, which confirmed Jansky’s discovery. Reber had difficulty having his findings published because astronomers at the time knew too little about radio and radio engineers knew little about astronomy. His papers were finally published in Astrophysical Journal only after several, better educated, astronomers had visited his dish in Wheaton, Illinois. Reber refused a research appointment from Yerkes.
He then focused on making a radiofrequency sky map. He conducted the first thorough survey of radio waves across the sky and organized his data in maps showing the radio radiation of the Milky Way. He completed this in 1941 and extended it in 1943. In 1944, he became the first to detect radio emissions from the Andromeda galaxy and the sun. As his reputation grew, Reber became a professional scientist when he was hired at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards of Technology) in 1947, to manage the agency’s first radio telescope. He wasn’t fond of the bureaucracy and quit within a few years. He ended up moving to Hawaii where he designed and built a rotating antenna to study the ionosphere. In the 1950s, he turned his focus to cosmic radio waves at very low frequencies, which can only penetrate the Earth’s ionosphere in certain areas and times of low solar activity. One area where these waves can reach the Earth is the Tasmanian region of Australia, so Reber relocated and continued his studies there until his death, with generally unrestricted grants from the Research Corporation. 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. According to this theory, it would be expected that there would be considerably more high-energy light than low-energy, due to the presence of stars and other hot bodies. 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 built on a turntable at their field station in Sterling, Virginia. Eventually the telescope made its way to NRAO in Green Bank, West Virginia. Reber supervised its reconstruction at that site and he also helped with a reconstruction of Jansky’s original telescope. He also conducted research in archeology, botany, electronics, and meteorology, and designed his own energy-efficient home and electric car. He died on December 20th, 2002 in Tasmania, Australia.
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