Jansky, Karl Guthe
Jansky's discovery was serendipitous. Not only was it by chance that he had chosen a frequency at which the galactic center emits large amounts of radiation and at which the earth's atmosphere is transparent, he also was working at a period of minimum sunspot activity which occurs only every 11 years. At sunspot maximum, the ionosphere would have blocked all extraterrestrial radio waves at the 20 MHz frequency, and signals from the Milky Way would not have been detected.
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