On a bright spring morning 50 years ago, two young astronomers at Bell Laboratories were tuning a 20-foot, horn-shaped antenna pointed toward the sky over New Jersey. Their goal was to measure the Milky Way galaxy, home to planet EarthYou can read more here
To their puzzlement, Robert W. Wilson and Arno A. Penzias heard the insistent hiss of radio signals coming from every direction—and from beyond the Milky Way. It took a full year of testing, experimenting and calculating for them and another group of researchers at Princeton to explain the phenomenon: It was cosmic microwave background radiation, a residue of the primordial explosion of energy and matter that suddenly gave rise to the universe some 13.8 billion years ago. The scientists had found evidence that would confirm the Big Bang theory, first proposed by Georges Lemaître in 1931.
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Here are the lectures from the event:
I went to this and it was COOL. What was especially interesting to learn was that Bob Wilson, discoverer of the leftover radiation from the Big Bang (cosmic microwave background), was actually looking for something completely different---hoping to find a radio signal from Cassiopeia A!
ReplyDeleteIt was only coincidence that he happened to be put in touch with a team at Princeton who had been working on predicting the CMB signal, led by Bob Dicke.