I RECENTLY discovered that the sphere of radio astronomy primarily began with a meteor bathe. It was December 1945, and physicist Bernard Lovell was in Cheshire, UK, looking for cosmic rays – high-energy particles that zip via house. He had obtained a radar detector left over from the British military after the second world struggle, and a patch of land owned by the College of Manchester’s botany division.

It simply so occurred that the night time Lovell picked to seek for cosmic rays was 14 December, the height of the Geminid meteor bathe. When he turned the radar gun on, he picked…