'A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 Mc/s,' pp. 419-421 in The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 142, No. 1, July 1, 1965; 'Cosmic Black-Body Radiation,' pp. 414-419 in ibid

PENZIAS, Arno & WILSON, Robert.; DICKE, Robert, PEEBLES, James, ROLL, Peter & WILKINSON, David

Edité par The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1965

A propos de cet article

The Discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background. First edition, rare, journal issue in the original printed wrappers, of the paired papers by which the cosmic microwave background was announced and interpreted-Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson's two-and-a-half-page letter reporting an unexplained excess antenna temperature at the Bell Laboratories horn at Holmdel, New Jersey, together with its six-page theoretical companion by Robert Dicke, James Peebles, Peter Roll, and David Wilkinson at Princeton, which identified the excess as the cooled thermal radiation of the hot early universe. For their discovery Penzias and Wilson received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics; Peebles received the 2019 Nobel Prize for the theoretical cosmology of which the Dicke-Peebles-Roll-Wilkinson paper is a founding document. The present single-issue form of The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 142, No. 1, in the original wrappers, contains both papers consecutively. Harvard's Edward Purcell, reading the announcement in the summer of 1965, judged that it 'just may be the most important thing anybody has ever seen'; Robert Jastrow, writing a decade later, called it 'one of the greatest discoveries in 500 years of modern astronomy.' No copy of the issue in original wrappers is recorded on RBH; the only comparable recent appearance is an ex-library bound copy (Bonhams, 24 October 2025, $3,072). The Astrophysical Journal for 1 July 1965 contains on eight consecutive pages the two companion letters that announced the discovery of the cosmic microwave background - the thermal relic of the universe's earliest moments and the decisive confirmation of Big Bang cosmology. On pages 414 to 419 appears the theoretical interpretation by Robert H. Dicke, P. James E. Peebles, P.G. Roll and David T. Wilkinson of Princeton University; on pages 419 to 421, the observational report by Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson of Bell Telephone Laboratories. Penzias and Wilson came to the result by elimination rather than design. Their instrument was a 20-foot horn-reflector antenna on Crawford Hill at Holmdel, New Jersey, originally built in 1959 for NASA's Project Echo passive communications satellite and later deployed on the Telstar programme. Working at 4080 Mc/s (7.35 centimetres), they found an excess antenna temperature of approximately 3.5 K - isotropic, unpolarized, and persistent through every attempt at elimination, including the removal of pigeons nesting in the antenna throat. Across New Jersey, Robert Dicke had independently arrived at the expectation of exactly this background. Motivated by his scalar-tensor theory of gravitation and an oscillating-universe model, Dicke asked Peebles to work out the theory; Peebles circulated a preprint in early 1965 predicting relic radiation. Roll and Wilkinson were already constructing a radiometer on the Princeton campus to detect it. They were perhaps six months from doing so when the Bell Labs observation pre-empted them. The two groups were brought together by Bernard Burke of MIT, who had heard of the Peebles preprint through Kenneth Turner and passed it to Penzias. Penzias telephoned Princeton. Dicke took the call during his weekly group lunch, listened, then told his collaborators they had been anticipated. They agreed to publish companion letters simultaneously: the Princeton theoretical interpretation first, the Bell Labs measurement second. The Dicke et al. letter, dated 7 May 1965 from Palmer Physical Laboratory, Princeton, was submitted citing the Bell Labs result as a private communication. The Penzias and Wilson letter was received by the journal six days later, on 13 May 1965. Dicke et al. includes Fig. 1 - a plot of the possible thermal history of the universe from nucleosynthesis through plasma recombination - and acknowledges Penzias and Wilson by name for demonstrating their receiving system. The Penzias and Wilson letter concludes with a single sentence referring the reader to the companion letter for a possibl.

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Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: 'A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 Mc/s,' pp. 419-421 in The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 142, No. 1, July 1, 1965; 'Cosmic Black-Body Radiation,' pp. 414-419 in ibid
• Éditeur: The University of Chicago Press, Chicago
• Date de parution: 1965
• Édition: First edition.
• Catalogues du vendeur:
  • Astronomy, Relativity Theory