The Cygnus wireless alarm and evacuation system has been named after the constellation Cygnus called Cygnus A which was discovered in 1951 and is one of the strongest radio sources in the sky.

This galaxy was found to be 500 million light years away and was a fantastic discovery. It showed that the process that causes the radio waves to be given off must be colossally powerful, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to detect them from so far away. In fact the radiation from Cygnus A is about a million times as powerful as that discovered from the milky way by Karl Jansky in 1933. Galaxies which are strong sources of radio waves are called radio galaxies and many have been found since the discovery of Cygnus A.

The Cygnus constellation form a swan shape. Cygnus is the Latin word for swan.