The Nobel Prize no LinkedIn: In 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered the green mould he was working with… | 27 comentários
When Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson attempted to listen to microwave signals transmitted from our solar system using a large radio antenna they were constantly being hampered by the presence of an annoying background hiss.
After a year spent persistently and painstakingly trying to identify and remove all possible causes for the unwanted noise – from radio signals from neighbouring cities to pigeons nesting in the horn-shaped antenna – they concluded that this interference was due to microwaves present throughout the universe and at a temperature of around three degrees above absolute zero.
The reason of the noise, it turned out, wasn’t the birds. It didn’t even come from Earth, or even our own galaxy. It was radiation left over from the Big Bang – known as the cosmic microwave background radiation. The same afterglow from the early universe could also be seen as the snowy static on analogue televisions.
The picture shows the full-sky image of the temperature fluctuations (shown as colour differences) in the cosmic microwave background, over a nine-year period.
In 1978, Wilson and Penzias received the Nobel Prize in Physics “for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation.”
Read more about 1978 physics prize: https://bit.ly/2VMa5Uc
