- How did Michelson and Morley's interferometer attempt to detect Earth's motion through the ether?
- What instruments did Michelson refine to make his light-speed measurements so precise?
Radio Astronomy
Observing the universe through radio wavelengths.
- What practical telephone-static problem was Karl Jansky originally trying to solve at Bell Labs?
- Why did the hiss that repeated every 23 hours and 56 minutes point to a source among the stars rather than on Earth?
- How did Jansky determine that the persistent radio hiss was coming from the direction of the galactic centre?
- What later astronomical discoveries grew out of the field of radio astronomy that Jansky's antenna founded?
- Why were Britain's wartime radar stations picking up mysterious interference in February 1942?
- Why was James Stanley Hey's discovery kept classified for four years before publication?
- How did a wartime search for enemy bombers end up founding the field of radio astronomy?
- Why did Bernard Lovell face possible bankruptcy and criminal proceedings just as the telescope was completed?
- How did the Lovell Telescope end up being the only instrument able to track Sputnik's carrier rocket?
- What later scientific discoveries did the Lovell Telescope contribute to beyond tracking early space missions?
- How did Cyril Hazard use a lunar occultation to pin down the position of 3C 273?
- Why did radio astronomers initially call objects like 3C 273 'quasi-stellar radio sources'?
- How did Arecibo's design use a natural limestone sinkhole to support its 305-metre dish?
- What did Arecibo reveal about the true rotation period of Mercury?
- What was the Arecibo Message, and why was it aimed at the globular cluster M13?
- How did the discovery of the first binary pulsar at Arecibo lead to confirmation of gravitational waves?
- How did British astronomers at Jodrell Bank manage to decode Luna 9's images before the Soviets released them?
- What was unusual about the radio pulse Jocelyn Bell noticed in the chart-recorder data in August 1967?
- How does aperture synthesis let several small radio dishes act like one enormous one?
- How did Ryle's synthesis technique lead to instruments like the Very Large Array in New Mexico?
- What made Penzias and Wilson's microwave antenna hiss suspicious enough to investigate for years?
- Why did Penzias and Wilson initially blame pigeons for the noise in their antenna?
- How did Russell Hulse first notice that PSR B1913+16 was actually a binary pulsar rather than an ordinary one?
- How did Duncan Lorimer and David Narkevic discover the first fast radio burst in archival telescope data?
- What did the dispersion measure of the pulse reveal about its distance from Earth?
- How much energy did the burst release compared to the Sun's radio emission?
- How has the field of fast radio burst research grown since the 2007 discovery?
- How does FAST's design use a natural karst depression and adjustable aluminium panels to focus on different parts of the sky?
- How does FAST's 500-metre aperture compare to the Arecibo Observatory it surpassed?
- What has FAST discovered about pulsars since beginning operations?
- How did linking eight radio observatories across four continents effectively turn Earth into a single telescope?