Karl Guthe Jansky (1905–1950) was an American physicist and radio engineer who is often credited as one of the founders of radio astronomy. While working for Bell Telephone Laboratories in the early 1930s, he discovered cosmic radio waves while studying sources of static that interfered with shortwave radio transmissions. In 1932, he identified a persistent radio signal coming from the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which he initially thought was related to weather phenomena on Earth.
