Penzias

Penzias refers to Arno Allan Penzias, a German-born American physicist and Nobel laureate best known for co-discovering the cosmic microwave background radiation. He was born in Munich on April 26, 1933, and emigrated to the United States with his family in 1937.

In 1964, while working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, Penzias and his colleague Robert Woodrow Wilson detected a persistent, unexplained radio noise in their horn antenna. After ruling out instrumental and local sources, they realized the signal was isotropic across the sky. Independently, researchers including theorists who predicted a relic radiation from a hot early universe interpreted the finding as the cosmic microwave background radiation, the afterglow of the Big Bang. The discovery provided crucial empirical support for the Big Bang model and has since become a cornerstone of modern cosmology. The radiation is observed today as microwave radiation with a near-uniform temperature of about 2.7 kelvin.

For this work, Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978. The discovery had a lasting impact on cosmology, transforming our understanding of the origins and evolution of the universe. Throughout his career, Penzias conducted research in radio astronomy and microwave physics, principally at Bell Labs, contributing to instrumentation and methods used in observational cosmology.