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Arno Allan Penzias
(1933)
German-American astrophysicist who shared one-half of the 1978 Nobel
Prize for Physics with Robert Woodrow Wilson for their discovery of
a faint electromagnetic radiation throughout the universe. Their detection
of this radiation lent strong support to the big-bang model of cosmic
evolution. (The other half of the Nobel Prize was awarded to the Soviet
physicist Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa for unrelated work.)
Educated at City College of New York in New York City and Columbia University,
where he received his doctorate in 1962, Penzias joined Bell Telephone
Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J. In collaboration with Wilson he began
monitoring radio emissions from a ring of gas encircling the Milky Way
Galaxy. Unexpectedly, the two scientists detected a uniform microwave
radiation that suggested a residual thermal energy throughout the universe
of about 3 K. Most scientists now agree that this is the residual background
radiation stemming from the primordial explosion billions of years ago
from which the universe was created. In 1976 Penzias became director
of the Bell Radio Research Laboratory and in 1981 vice president of
research at Bell Laborator
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