1965Reputable sourceWell documented
The Cosmic Microwave Background
On the timeline · around 1965 ·
What happened
In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, testing a radio antenna, found a faint hiss of microwaves coming from every direction in the sky. They had detected the cosmic microwave background — the cooled afterglow of the hot, dense early universe, released some 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
Why it matters
The cosmic microwave background was the decisive evidence that the universe began in a Big Bang, confirming the expanding-universe picture. Its study has since become one of the most precise tools in all of physics. Penzias and Wilson shared the 1978 Nobel Prize.
Sources
- The Nobel Prize. Arno Penzias – Facts (Nobel Prize in Physics 1978) · Reputable source
Related timelines
- The Universe → — The afterglow of the Big Bang