Cosmologist Arno Allan Penzias, known for his discovery of Microwave background radiation (KMPI) along with Robert Wilson, died on January 22 at the age of 90. For his merits, he shared half of the 1978 Nobel Physics Award with Wilson, the second half was awarded to Peter Kapitsa for working in the field of low temperatures.
Born in Munich on April 26, 1933, Penzias, at the age of six, fled from Nazi Germany with his family, first to England, and then in 1940 he moved to New York. In 1954, he graduated from the Faculty of Physics of the City College of New York, after which he served as an officer-radio operator in the signaling troops of the US Army until 1956.
Then Penzias went to the Radiation Laboratory of Colombian University, where he studied microwave physics and in 1962 defended his doctoral dissertation under the leadership of the inventor Mazer Charles Towns.
In the laboratories Bell Labs, New Jersey, where he was engaged in the development of microwave receivers for radio astronomy, Penzias, along with Wilson, used a reflect antenna with a diameter of 6 meters with an ultrashuma receiver of 7 cm. In 1964, they discovered excessive radiation at 3K, which could not be eliminated.
At first, they believed that the noise of radio waves at a wavelength of 7.35 cm is of earthly origin, since it was approximately the same in all directions of the sky. They even assumed that this could be caused by the flow of pigeons on the antenna.
In fact, they stumbled upon a cosmic microwave background radiation, first predicted by cosmologists by Ralph Alfer and Robert Herman in the late 1940s.
The results of their experiments were published in the journal Astrophysical Journal along with work by Roberta Dick, who previously calculated that the Universe should be filled with relic radiation of a black body with a minimum temperature of 10 K. Dick interpreted a noise recorded by Penzia and Wilson as a confirmation of the CMFI.
At that time, there were two main competing theories about the universe: the theory of a “stationary state”, according to which the Universe is constantly expanding, but with a fixed density, and the theory of a “large explosion”, suggesting that the Universe began at one point and expands.
The opening of the CMFI was the first direct evidence that the Universe began with a hot large explosion.