- 1934 – Richard Tolman shows that blackbody radiation in an expanding
universe cools but remains thermal - 1941 – Andrew McKellar uses the excitation of CN doublet lines to
measure that the “effective temperature of space” is about 2.3 K - 1948 – George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman predict that a Big
Bang universe will have a blackbody cosmic microwave background with
temperature about 5 K - 1955 – Tigran Shmaonov finds excess microwave emission with a
temperature of roughly 3 K - 1964 – A. G. Doroshkevich and Igor Novikov write an unnoticed paper
suggesting microwave searches for the blackbody radiation predicted by
Gamow, Alpher, and Herman - 1965 – Arno Penzias, Robert Wilson, Bernie Burke, Robert Dicke, and
James Peebles discover the cosmic microwave background radiation - 1966 – Rainer Sachs and Arthur Wolfe theoretically predict microwave
background fluctuation amplitudes created by gravitational potential
variations between observers and the last scattering surface (see
Integrated Sachs Wolfe effect) - 1968 – Martin Rees and Dennis Sciama theoretically predict microwave
background fluctuation amplitudes created by photons traversing
time-dependent potential wells - 1969 – R. A. Sunyaev and Yakov Zel’dovich study the inverse Compton
scattering of microwave background photons by hot electrons - 1990 – The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite shows that the
microwave background has a nearly perfect blackbody spectrum and
thereby strongly constrains the density of the intergalactic medium - 1992 – The COBE satellite discovers anisotropy in the cosmic microwave
background - 2003 – the WMAP satellite produces a high resolution map of the cosmic
microwave background.
You May Also Like
More Trending
