29.4 The cosmic microwave background  (Page 2/10)

Cosmic microwave background and clouds compared.

The detection of this afterglow was initially an accident. In the late 1940s, Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman , working with George Gamow , realized that just before the universe became transparent, it must have been radiating like a blackbody at a temperature of about 3000 K—the temperature at which hydrogen atoms could begin to form. If we could have seen that radiation just after neutral atoms formed, it would have resembled radiation from a reddish star. It was as if a giant fireball filled the whole universe.

But that was nearly 14 billion years ago, and, in the meantime, the scale of the universe has increased a thousand fold. This expansion has increased the wavelength of the radiation by a factor of 1000 (see [link] ). According to Wien’s law, which relates wavelength and temperature, the expansion has correspondingly lowered the temperature by a factor of 1000 (see the chapter on Radiation and Spectra ).

Alpher and Herman predicted that the glow from the fireball should now be at radio wavelengths and should resemble the radiation from a blackbody at a temperature only a few degrees above absolute zero. Since the fireball was everywhere throughout the universe, the radiation left over from it should also be everywhere. If our eyes were sensitive to radio wavelengths, the whole sky would appear to glow very faintly. However, our eyes can’t see at these wavelengths, and at the time Alpher and Herman made their prediction, there were no instruments that could detect the glow. Over the years, their prediction was forgotten.

In the mid-1960s, in Holmdel, New Jersey, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of AT&T’s Bell Laboratories had built a delicate microwave antenna ( [link] ) to measure astronomical sources, including supernova remnants like Cassiopeia A (see the chapter on The Death of Stars ). They were plagued with some unexpected background noise, just like faint static on a radio, which they could not get rid of. The puzzling thing about this radiation was that it seemed to be coming from all directions at once. This is very unusual in astronomy: after all, most radiation has a specific direction where it is strongest—the direction of the Sun, or a supernova remnant, or the disk of the Milky Way, for example.