![]() ![]() The thing we did see was much more important than what we were looking for. “When an experiment goes wrong, it’s usually the best thing. “We started out seeking a halo around the Milky Way and we found something else,” notes Dr. ![]() Maybe their droppings were causing the noise? Wilson and Penzias had the birds trapped and then cleaned the equipment, but the signals continued.Īfter a year of experiments, the scientists concluded that they’d detected the cosmic background radiation, an echo of the universe at a very early moment after its birth. Two pigeons had set up housekeeping inside the guts of the antenna. We constructed a whole new throat section and then tested the instrument with it.”Īt one point, new suspects emerged. Among things, we searched for radiation from the walls of the antenna, especially the throat, which is the small end of the horn. “We looked for anything in the instrument or in the environment that might be causing the excess antenna noise. He and his wife Betsy Wilson still live in Holmdel, New Jersey, not far from hilltop where the tests were run. “I had a lot of experience fixing practical problems in radio telescopes,” Robert Wilson now says. Or maybe, the hissing sound was the result of a defect in their instrument? Was the signal actually radio noise from nearby New York City? Was it the after-effects of a nuclear bomb test that had been conducted over the Pacific several years earlier? Could it be a signal from the Van Allen belts, those giant rings of charged radiation circling the Earth? Penzias initially heard those astonishing radio signals that would lead to the first confirmed proof for the Big Bang Theory, they wondered if they had made a mistake. Send us feedback about these examples.In 1964, when Robert W. These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'cosmic background radiation.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Jennifer Leman, Popular Mechanics, 25 Sep. 2020 The sparse pockets of space that contain little but cosmic background radiation, leftover energy from the formation of the universe, hover in at around 2.7 kelvin. 2021 The sparse pockets of space that contain little but cosmic background radiation, leftover energy from the formation of the universe, hover in at around 2.7 kelvin. 2020 Jane listens to the crackle of white noise- cosmic background radiation-a faint reminder of the big bang. ![]() 2022 The sparse pockets of space that contain little but cosmic background radiation, leftover energy from the formation of the universe, hover in at around 2.7 kelvin. 2022 The cosmic background radiation, a burst of universe-wide energy that was released just 380,000 years or so after the Big Bang has a red shift of about 1,100. Jennifer Leman, Popular Mechanics, 22 Nov. Recent Examples on the Web The sparse pockets of space that contain little but cosmic background radiation, leftover energy from the formation of the universe, hover in at around 2.7 kelvin. ![]()
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