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 Perhaps sparked by the attention resulting from the New York Times article and realizing that his published Proc. IRE paper incorrectly suggested that the hiss type noise originated in the Sun, on 8 May, Karl sent a short note to Nature, titled, “Radio Waves from Outside the Solar System,” (Jansky 1933a). In this paper, published on 8 July, Jansky states, “the direction of arrival of this disturbance remains fixed in space, that is to say the source of this noise is located in some region that is stationary with respect to the stars.” He goes on to give the direction of the radio noise as “right ascension of 18 hours and declination of -10 degrees.” In a paper meant for a more popular audience, Jansky (1933c) confidently used the more specific and provocative title, “Electrical Phenomena that Apparently Are of Interstellar Origin.”

Jansky originally had wanted to announce his discovery at the Chicago IRE meeting which was held in June 1933, but Friis had rejected his request and “insisted” that he give the talk instead at the April URSI meeting. Following the attention resulting from the New York Times article and the NBC broadcast, at Karl’s request, his brother Moreau again stepped in to use his influence to get Karl invited to the June IRE meeting.19 At this point, ignoring Friis’ reservations, but with the encouragement of more senior Bell Labs management, Karl decided on his own to change his title “to suit myself.”20 His IRE talk was published in the Proc. IRE (Jansky 1933b) as his now classic paper on “Electrical Disturbances Apparently of Extraterrestrial Origin.” For the benefit of the IRE engineering readers, he first reviewed the relationship between terrestrial and astronomical coordinate systems and the difference between solar and sidereal time. In his introductory summary, he concludes “that the direction of arrival of these waves is fixed in space, i.e., that the waves come from some source outside the solar system,” and here he gives this direction as the “center of the huge galaxy of stars and nebulae of which the sun is a member.” Following his talk, Karl sent a copy of his paper to the well-known Princeton astronomer, Henry Norris Russell, and arranged to meet with Russell to discuss the meaning of his star noise.

For the next two years, Jansky was apparently preoccupied with other research activities, but found the time to analyze his data more carefully. In July 1935, he again gave a talk at the Annual IRE Convention in Detroit, and was able to report that the radio emission came from the entire galactic plane with the strongest radiation coming from the Galactic Center.21 In his third Proc. IRE paper, following his Detroit talk, Jansky (1935) explained that the noise peaks correspond to those times when the antenna beam is oriented along the plane of the Milky Way, and second, that the largest peak comes from the “that section of the Milky Way nearest the center.” Although he concluded that the “most obvious explanation of these phenomena … is that the stars themselves are sending out these radiations,” he did not exclude the possibility “that the waves that reach the antenna are secondary radiations caused by some form of bombardment of the atmosphere by high speed particles which are shot off by the stars.” In this paper, Jansky also made the first attempt to understand the physics behind his star noise noting that “one is immediately struck by the