Antenna Hiss Revealed Big-Bang Radiation

Bell Labs physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson spent a year trying to eliminate a persistent hiss from their antenna in Holmdel, New Jersey. They ruled out interference, evicted nesting pigeons, and scrubbed their droppings from the equipment, but the noise remained. Princeton physicist Robert Dicke helped confirm that the signal was cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang. The discovery earned Penzias and Wilson the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.

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