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In 1964, two American radio astronomers stumbled upon the most profound and ancient signal ever detected—a persistent cosmic hiss that provided the first direct evidence of the universe's explosive birth. This accidental discovery of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson not only validated the Big Bang theory but also transformed the field of cosmology from theoretical speculation into a precision science.
Working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, Penzias and Wilson were using a large horn-shaped antenna to study faint radio waves from the Milky Way. They were frustrated by a constant, low-level background noise that persisted no matter where they pointed the antenna. The signal was uniform and unchanging, day or night. After ruling out all possible terrestrial sources, including radio interference and equipment malfunction, they even famously cleaned the antenna of "a white dielectric material"—pigeon droppings—but the mysterious hiss remained (Penzias & Wilson, 1965).
Unbeknownst to them, a team of physicists at nearby Princeton University, led by Robert Dicke, was actively searching for this very signal. Dicke's team had theorized that if the universe began with a hot, dense "Big Bang," the residual heat should still be detectable as a faint microwave glow filling all of space. When Penzias learned of the Princeton group's work through a mutual contact, the connection was immediately clear. The Bell Labs "noise" was the Princeton group's predicted "signal"—the afterglow of creation itself.
The CMB is the oldest light in the universe, a snapshot of the cosmos when it was only about 380,000 years old. This discovery provided overwhelming evidence for the Big Bang model over the competing Steady State theory. For their groundbreaking work, Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978 (The Nobel Foundation, 1978).
* **Temperature:** The CMB has a near-perfect black-body spectrum with an average temperature of 2.725 Kelvin, just a few degrees above absolute zero (NASA, 2022).
* **Uniformity:** The radiation is remarkably uniform across the entire sky, but tiny temperature fluctuations within it are the seeds from which all cosmic structures, like galaxies, eventually formed.
This discovery opened a new window into the early universe, allowing scientists to study its origins with unprecedented detail through subsequent missions like the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).
### References
* NASA. (2022). *Cosmic Microwave Background*. NASA Science. Retrieved from https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-powered-the-big-bang/cosmic-microwave-background
* Penzias, A. A., & Wilson, R. W. (1965). A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 Mc/s. *The Astrophysical Journal*, 142, 419–421.
* The Nobel Foundation. (1978). *The Nobel Prize in Physics 1978*. NobelPrize.org. Retrieved from https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1978/summary/
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