It was there day and night, throughout the year, and appeared wherever they were pointing their antenna. There was one part of the signal, however, that they could not eliminate. Wilson (foreground) with Penzias in front of the Bell Labs horn radio antenna. Since its initial discovery, astronomers have used the CMB to learn a great deal about the universe, such as its origins, its age, its composition, its rate of expansion and even its future. One was the Big Bang theory and the other was “the Steady State theory”, which stated that the universe has existed forever. At the time it was discovered, there were two competing theories for the origin of the universe. The light from the Big Bang, which happened almost 14 billion years ago, has been travelling through the universe ever since, allowing us to detect this “afterglow” on Earth. Today, the CMB is still one of the most important signals that helps us understand the cosmos. Their detection of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the radiation left over from the birth of the universe, provided the strongest possible evidence that the universe expanded from an initial violent explosion, known as The Big Bang. Fifty years ago, Bob Dylan had only just gone electric, mankind had yet to take its great leap and many people thought the Big Bang was something that happened when you burst a Big Balloon.īut in July 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson made a discovery that would cement our understanding of how the universe came into being.
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