I RECENTLY learned that the field of radio astronomy essentially started with a meteor shower. It was December 1945, and physicist Bernard Lovell was in Cheshire, UK, searching for cosmic rays – high-energy particles that zip through space. He had obtained a radar detector left over from the British army after the second world war, and a patch of land owned by the University of Manchester’s botany department.

It just so happened that the night Lovell picked to search for cosmic rays was 14 December, the peak of the Geminid meteor shower. When he turned the radar gun on, he picked…