![]() ![]() the photons that decoupled from the matter) should be present with an almost perfect uniformity everywhere in the universe. To begin, in the middle of the 20th century, George Gamow surmised that if matter had been created during decoupling, than the primordial radiation (ie. It finally started to gain popularity with the discovery and identification of the Cosmic Microwave Background. Watch the discussion live on YouTube.So this whole time we have been talking about how the theory of a Hot Big Bang is the most accepted theory in cosmology today, but it was not always that way. On Thursday, February 20 at 7:30, Wilson will be joined in a panel discussion by cosmologist Alan Guth and astronomers Robert Kirshner and Avi Loeb at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the confirmation of the Big Bang Theory. Arno Penzias, who’d come to the United States as a child refugee from Nazi Germany, sent the radio receiver and its calibration system to the Deutsches Museum of Munich, the city of his birth.Īs for the giant horn antenna, it still stands tall on Holmdel Road, where it can be seen by the public. The pigeon trap is on loan from Robert Wilson. On the first floor in the " Exploring the Universe" gallery that metal trap built to capture the squatting pigeons, can be seen, along with some other instrumentation of that propitious moment 50 years ago. Visitors to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum have long been able to view an unassuming artifact of that Nobel Prize-winning discovery. This was really the start of modern cosmology.” In fact, Wilson and Penzias were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978 for determining that the hiss they were hearing wasn't pigeon poop at all, but the faint whisper of the Big Bang, or the after glow that astronomers call the cosmic microwave background. The thing we did see was much more important than what we were looking for. “When an experiment goes wrong, it’s usually the best thing. “We started out seeking a halo around the Milky Way and we found something else,” notes Dr. Maybe their droppings were causing the noise? Wilson and Penzias had the birds trapped and then cleaned the equipment, but the signals continued.Īfter a year of experiments, the scientists concluded that they’d detected the cosmic background radiation, an echo of the universe at a very early moment after its birth. Two pigeons had set up housekeeping inside the guts of the antenna. We constructed a whole new throat section and then tested the instrument with it.”Īt one point, new suspects emerged. Among things, we searched for radiation from the walls of the antenna, especially the throat, which is the small end of the horn. “We looked for anything in the instrument or in the environment that might be causing the excess antenna noise. He and his wife Betsy Wilson still live in Holmdel, New Jersey, not far from hilltop where the tests were run. “I had a lot of experience fixing practical problems in radio telescopes,” Robert Wilson now says. Or maybe, the hissing sound was the result of a defect in their instrument? Was the signal actually radio noise from nearby New York City? Was it the after-effects of a nuclear bomb test that had been conducted over the Pacific several years earlier? Could it be a signal from the Van Allen belts, those giant rings of charged radiation circling the Earth? Penzias initially heard those astonishing radio signals that would lead to the first confirmed proof for the Big Bang Theory, they wondered if they had made a mistake. ![]()
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