On this day in space: Feb. 27, 1942: J.S. Hey discovers radio emissions from the sun

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On Feb. 27, 1942, a British physicist named James Stanley Hey accidentally found out that the sun emits radio waves.

On Feb. 27, 1942, a British physicist named James Stanley Hey accidentally found out that the sun emits radio waves.

black and white photo of some guy

An artist's illustration of Western Union's massive Westar 4 communications satellite in orbit. It launched on Feb. 25, 1982. (Image credit: unknown)

Hey received reports that anti-aircraft radars were experiencing severe noise jamming. In other words, foreign radio-frequency signals were interfering with the radars' ability to operate.

When he investigated the signals, he realized that they weren't coming from Nazis — they were coming from the sun! More specifically, they were coming from an active sunspot.

On This Day in Space: See our full 365-day video archive!

Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos. 

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