Nobel Physicist Arno A Penzias, Whose Discovery Helped Establish Big Bang Theory, Dies At 90: Report

Arno Allan Penzias died on January 22, 2024, at an assisted living facility in San Francisco, due to complications of Alzheimer's disease, his son, David, has said.

American physicist Arno Allan Penzias, who won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, has died at 90 years of age. He shared the one-half of the Nobel Prize with Robert Woodrow Wilson. ( Image Source :Getty )

American physicist Arno Allan Penzias, who won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, has died at 90 years of age. He shared the one-half of the Nobel Prize with Robert Woodrow Wilson. Penzias died on January 22, 2024, at an assisted living facility in San Francisco, due to complications of Alzheimer's disease, his son, David, has said, The New York Times reported. 

In 1964, Penzias and Wilson discovered a faint electromagnetic radiation throughout the universe. The discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation helped establish the Big Bang Theory.

Penzias received his education at the City College of New York and Columbia University. In 1962, he obtained a doctorate from Columbia University. 

Subsequently, the physicist joined Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, and in collaboration with Wilson, began monitoring radio emissions from a ring of glass encircling the Milky Way Galaxy, according to Britannica.

Radiation reaches the Earth from outer space, and this cosmic radiation initially appeared to become weaker as wavelengths of the radiation became shorter. However, Penzias and Willson, while studying cosmic radiation in 1964, discovered that microwaves with a wavelength of about seven centimetres were stronger than expected.

While performing that experiment, Penzias and Wilson unexpectedly detected a uniform microwave radiation that suggested a residual thermal energy throughout the universe of about three Kelvin.

Initially, the two scientists thought that the results were caused by distortions or faults in the measurements. However, this was not the case. 

Now, most scientists agree that the microwave radiation is the residual background radiation that is a result of the primordial explosion which occurred billions of years ago. This explosion, which is the basis of the formation of the universe, is called the Big Bang. In other words, the cosmic microwave background radiation is probably a remnant of the Big Bang. 

Penzias served as the director of the Bell Radio Research Laboratory from 1976 to 1979. 

From 1981 to 1995, Penzias served as the vice president of research at Bell Laboratories, and from 1995 to 1998 as the chief scientist. 

What surprised Penzias and Wilson the most during their work on cosmic microwave background radiation is that its intensity is the same in all directions, proving that the universe is filled uniformly with microwave radiation.