This post has now been superseded by a more detailed post Measuring Distances in Cosmology ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I recently read an article on the popular astronomy website site Universe Today. It stated that ‘…the CMB [cosmic microwave background radiation] is visible at a distance of 13.8 billion light years in all directions from Earth, leading scientists… Continue reading Distances in Cosmology
Tag: microwave background
Jim Peebles winner of the Noble Prize 2019
I was interested to hear that Jim Peebles, at the age of 84, has won a half share of the 2019 Noble Prize for physics for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology. Jim Peebles (1935-) Image from Wikimedia commons In the early 1960s Peebles and his colleague Robert Dicke had predicted the existence of the microwave… Continue reading Jim Peebles winner of the Noble Prize 2019
The cosmic microwave background part II
As discussed in my previous post, the accidental discovery of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson would prove to be one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the early twentieth century. One of the first things it achieved was to provide confirmation of the big bang theory. The telescope… Continue reading The cosmic microwave background part II
The cosmic microwave background: part I
In 1964 two young American radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, made an accidental finding which would win them both the Nobel prize and turned out to be one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. The story started when Penzias and Wilson were given observing time on a large radio telescope at Bell Labs in New… Continue reading The cosmic microwave background: part I
Explaining Science 