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I RECENTLY realized that the sector of radio astronomy primarily began with a meteor shower. It was December 1945, and physicist Bernard Lovell was in Cheshire, UK, trying to find cosmic rays – high-energy particles that zip by way of area. He had obtained a radar detector left over from the British military after the second world conflict, and a patch of land owned by the University of Manchester’s botany division.
It simply so occurred that the evening Lovell picked to seek for cosmic rays was 14 December, the height of the Geminid meteor shower. When he turned the radar gun on, he picked…