Cosmic microwave background radiation
Radiación de fondo cósmico de microondas
- Date
- 1965 · confidence high
- Place
- Bell Labs, Holmdel, New Jersey, United States
- Credited to
- Arno Penzias; Robert Wilson; Robert Dicke; George Gamow (prediction)
- People
- 👤 Arno Allan Penzias1933–2024👤 Robert Woodrow Wilson1936–
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
An isotropic microwave noise at 3 K that would not go away even after cleaning the pigeons out of the antenna turns out to be the residual glow of the Big Bang predicted by Gamow, Alpher and Herman. It confirms the hot origin of the universe and its perfect black-body behaviour.
Coordinate with astronomy. Dicke and his group at Princeton were building a detector to search for it when Penzias called.
What it led to
- Big Bang cosmology as a paradigm
- Precision measurements (COBE, WMAP, Planck)
- Cosmic inflation and the seeds of galaxies
- Precision cosmology
- The COBE, WMAP and Planck satellites
- The Lambda-CDM model
Built on
- Expansion of the universe (Hubble-Lemaître law)1927-1929
- Alpher–Bethe–Gamow theory1948
- General relativity and Friedmann-Lemaître models
- Alpher and Herman's prediction (1948)
- Holmdel horn antenna
Made possible
- Cosmic inflation theory1980-1981
- CMB anisotropies detected by COBE1992
- Accelerating expansion of the universe and dark energy1998
- Cosmological satellites
- Precision microwave radiometers
- Precision radiometry