CMB Map

Discovery & Confirmation of Big Bang

In 1964 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, working with Bell Labs’ Holmdel horn antenna in New Jersey, detected an isotropic microwave hiss they could not attribute to any known source. Their 1965 paper identified the signal as the long-predicted remnant of a hot early Universe; the discovery earned them the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics and dealt a decisive blow to the rival steady-state cosmology.