Bell Labs is an American industrial research and scientific development company. Researchers from there are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and others. Ten Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.
An aerial photo of Bell Labs' headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey in 2012
Bell's 1893 Volta Bureau building in Washington, D.C.
The Bell Laboratories Building, built at 463 West Street in New York City in 1925
The Old Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, located about 20 miles south of New York City, in New Jersey
Radio astronomy is a subfield of astronomy that studies celestial objects at radio frequencies. The first detection of radio waves from an astronomical object was in 1933, when Karl Jansky at Bell Telephone Laboratories reported radiation coming from the Milky Way. Subsequent observations have identified a number of different sources of radio emission. These include stars and galaxies, as well as entirely new classes of objects, such as radio galaxies, quasars, pulsars, and masers. The discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation, regarded as evidence for the Big Bang theory, was made through radio astronomy.
The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, a radio interferometer in New Mexico, United States
Chart on which Jocelyn Bell Burnell first recognised evidence of a pulsar, in 1967 (exhibited at Cambridge University Library)
The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), many antennas linked together in a radio interferometer
An optical image of the galaxy M87 (HST), a radio image of same galaxy using Interferometry (Very Large Array – VLA), and an image of the center section (VLBA) using a Very Long Baseline Array (Global VLBI) consisting of antennas in the US, Germany, Italy, Finland, Sweden and Spain. The jet of particles is suspected to be powered by a black hole in the center of the galaxy.