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Whose Discovery Was the Cosmic Microwave Background?
physicsastronomy
Quick Answer
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally detected the CMB in 1965.
The Full Story
In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, detected a persistent microwave "noise" coming from every direction in the sky while calibrating a radio antenna. They initially thought it was caused by pigeon droppings on the antenna. Physicists at nearby Princeton (Robert Dicke's group) realised the signal was the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — the afterglow of the Big Bang, predicted by George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman in the late 1940s. Penzias and Wilson shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Key Facts
1.The CMB has a temperature of about 2.725 Kelvin (−270.4 °C).
2.It was emitted about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe cooled enough for atoms to form.
3.COBE, WMAP, and Planck satellites later mapped the CMB in extraordinary detail.
YouTube Angle
Suggested video title for this topic:
"The Hiss From the Beginning — How the CMB Was Found"