Soon enough, they realized that what they had detected was the (at that point only theorized) Cosmic Background Radiation and wrote a paper publishing their discovery.Īrno Penzias and Robert Wilson shared a Nobel Prize in physics in 1978 for their accidental discovery of CMB. No matter how much they tried removing the interference, the radiation would not go away. They encountered radiation that was an annoying source of too much noise. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were building a radio receiver for the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey for experiments in satellite communication. Subsequently, in the 1960s, it was theorized that the CMB could be detected, but it wasn’t until 1965 that it was finally “seen”. Their prediction didn’t gain much traction at the time, as the astronomical community was not very intrigued by cosmology. He did this with his colleagues Robert Herman and George Gamow through their research on Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. In 1948, Ralph Alpherin, an American cosmologist, first predicted the CMB. This was 380,000 years after the Big Bang and we know this because, as we study the CMB today, it can be dated back to this time after the universe’s opacity became radiation. The universe became more transparent and the last photons hit matter at this time. The universe cooled down enough for atoms to form, but the wandering photons didn’t interact with the hydrogen atoms and instead started traveling in straight lines. Thus the cosmic microwave background photons simply scattered off the electrons and the photons aimlessly wandered as “optical light wanders through a dense fog”.Īlso Read: How Do We Know The Big Bang Happened If No One Was There To See It? ![]() This heat did not let atoms form in the earlier stages, so they were subsequently broken down into photons and electrons. The density of matter was equally ridiculous back then, about the same as the density of air at the surface of Earth.ĬMB is radiation that is a remnant of the tremendous heat of the universe’s infancy. For instance, in these early stages, the size of the universe was about one hundred-millionth the size of the universe today and the temperature was 273 million degrees above absolute zero (absolute zero is the lowest temperature that is theoretically possible-Zero Kelvin). ![]() Initially, the density was very high and the temperature was far too hot for the building blocks of matter to form. The universe was extremely dense and hot in the initial stages (Photo Credit : VectorMine/ Shutterstock)Īfter the singularity, our universe went through various phases.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |